I’ve been working on a site idea the general concept is a full text search of documents that also allows user ratings based on these rating I wanted to boost the item’s value in the Lucene index. But I’m trying to find if I should extend JackRabbit or just build from the Lucene base. Is there any good way to extend JackRabbit in this way and effect the index or would it be best to work directly off Lucene?
Either way I go I am strongly leaning to using groovy on grails with either the searchable plugin or work directly with JackRabbit is there any major reasons I should just stick to Java?
Clarification:
I would like to boost an item based on the average user rating of an item, is JackRabbit open enough or expandable enough where I can capture user ratings then have those effect the index within JackRabbit or is it so far out of the core of JackRabbit I should just build up from Lucene?
I recommend using JCR, with the implementation of Jackrabbit behind it. JCR allows you to separate between what you store and how you store it.
By staying within a JCR framework, you should be able to easily switch among JCR implementations. (There are several, not just Apache’s.) Even within Jackrabbit are many persistence managers, not just Lucene. This flexibility is useful when you want to trade off between storage space and performance.
JCR already includes full text searches and the ability to maintain user ratings. It should be a good fit for your project.