Lucene vs Solr
Many people new to Lucene and Solr will ask the obvious question: Should I use Lucene or Solr?
The answer is simple: if you're asking yourself this question, in 99% of situations, what you want to use is Solr.
A simple way to conceptualize the relationship between Solr and Lucene is that of a car and its engine. You can't drive an engine, but you can drive a car. Similarly, Lucene is a programmatic library which you can't use as-is, whereas Solr is a complete application which you can use out-of-box.
What is Solr?
Apache Solr is a web application built around Lucene with all kinds of goodies.
It adds functionality like
- XML/HTTP and JSON APIs
- Hit highlighting
- Faceted Search and Filtering
- Geospatial Search
- Fast Incremental Updates and Index Replication
- Caching
- Replication
- Web administration interface etc
Unlike Lucene, Solr is a web application (WAR) which can be deployed in any servlet container, e.g. Jetty, Tomcat, Resin, etc.
Solr can be installed and used by non-programmers. Lucene cannot.