I am making an application where I am going to need full text search so I found Compass, but that project is no longer maintained and is replaced by elasticsearch. However I don’t understand it. Is it a own server that I need to do requests (get, put) etc against and then parse the JSON response? Are there no annotations like in Compass? I don’t understand how this is a replacement and how I use it with Java EE.
Or are there other better projects to use?
Elasticsearch is a great choice nowadays, if you liked Compass you’ll love it. Have a look at this answer that the author gave here on which he explains why he went ahead creating elasticsearch after Compass. In fact elasticsearch and Solr make both the use of Lucene pretty easy, adding also some features to it. You basically have a whole search engine server which is able to index your data, which you can then query in order to retrieve the data that you indexed.
Elasticsearch exposes RESTful APIs and it’s JSON based, but if you are looking for annotations in the Compass style you can have a look at the Object Search Engine Mapper for ElasticSearch.