First official public Beta release of Lucene.NET 4.8!

We are very pleased to announce the official public BETA release of Lucene.Net 4.8.0!

Lucene.Net is a port of the Java Lucene search engine library, written in C# and targeted at .NET users. Lucene.NET makes it easy to add full-text search capabilities, as well as geo-spatial search, faceting and many more features that are part of any modern application handling unstructured, textual data.

And now it also supports .NET Core!

This is a significant milestone as well as a significant design change from Lucene.Net 3.0.3. Since there are more than 350,000 executable lines of code (well over 900,000 lines of text), it has taken our team over 2½ years to port it from Java. This major version update is a culmination of the efforts of several people, and we truly want to thank everyone involved for your much needed help!

That said, we are not completely stable yet, and we need volunteers to help us get over the finish line. If you are a user of Lucene.NET, you are very encouraged to upgrade. The API has changed a bit but most of the pieces are working the same way as you are used to; and we are more confident in the stability of this beta version than we are with the older bits that are known to have index corruption issues.

The Bits and Bytes

The new design eliminates the legacy "Contrib" packages and is split among 18 NuGet packages (with a few others that may be ported if demand warrants it).

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net/4.8.0-beta00004 (main package where Lucene.NET's core lies) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Analysis.Common/4.8.0-beta00004 (you will probably need this too) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Analysis.Stempel/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Classification/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Codecs/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Expressions/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Facet/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Grouping/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Highlighter/4.8.0-beta00004 (for showing text snippets in results) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.ICU/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Join/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Memory/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Misc/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Queries/4.8.0-beta00004 (helpful stuff for powerful querying) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.QueryParser/4.8.0-beta00004 (very commonly used) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Sandbox/4.8.0-beta00004 https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Spatial/4.8.0-beta00004 (for geo-spatial searches) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Lucene.Net.Suggest/4.8.0-beta00004 (a whole new auto-complete and suggest capabilities)

The binaries can also be downloaded from the Apache servers: http://www.apache.org/dist/lucenenet/4.8.0-beta00004/

Stability and Readiness

The BETA is now ready to be tested on a wider scale, and we could use help both in locating any remaining issues and resolving them. Please report any bugs on our JIRA. If you don't already have a JIRA account, you can sign up here

Any other feedback please direct to our user/dev mailing lists as appropriate.

In addition to finding and fixing bugs, there are still some tasks remaining to make Lucene.Net 4.8.0 production ready and feature complete. See our contributor's guide for details (https://github.com/apache/lucenenet/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md). If you use Lucene.Net, please contribute 1 or 2 hours of your time to help us get the documentation comments fixed so we can generate complete API documentation (pull requests welcome).

Resources

• Source code can be found here: https://github.com/apache/lucenenet.
• MyGet feed with the latest bits from our CI server: https://myget.org/gallery/lucene-net-ci.
• An introductory video I shot @ Channel9 studios, showcasing the new version and how to begin using it: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/MVP-VisualStudio-Dev/LuceneNET-48-a-pre-release-introduction.
• Demo app using the latest bits, showcased in the video above: https://github.com/synhershko/LuceneNetDemo.
• All the info you need to get on our mailing lists - please ask any questions there: http://lucenenet.apache.org/community.html.

Thanks

Thank you Shad Storhaug, Connie Yau, Laimonas Simutis and Wyatt Barnett for doing the bulk of the work over the past few years. Thank you also our dear PMC members, past contributors and many users for helping making this happen.