Pushing the envelope

Finally got around to actually doing something with Lucene. Now I have, I wish I'd done it sooner. Its almost intuitively easy to use once you get the terminology. Almost everything I tried 'just worked'. Pure java full-text indexing, and just about every piece is extensible. Very nice.

I actually started off looking at Xindice for querying XML with XPath, which looks promising but it might be for my purposes that the flexibility (and simplicity) of Lucene's indexing is the better option.

Hopefully I'll get some time to look further into Xindice later in the week.

Today has been a day of much messing with markup. Put my safari account to good use delving through the O'Reilly books on Java and XML data binding, XML Schema and (just out of curiosity) Java NIO.

Digester is a very handy utility for quickly populating java objects from XML. Brilliant for config files. I'm experimenting with using it to put together a quick declarative framework for turning CSV files into XML. I define my CSV-to-XML mappings as XML and use Digester to build the mapping objects. Once the data has been turned into XML, I should be able to use Castor to build my business objects. And all without having to go near a parser.