This looks like a very cool project, just what Moodle needs. Will this be building on top of Zend's Zend_Search_Lucene? They appear to have amended the licence to prevent incompatibilities with the the GPL, so just the fact that it's PHP5-only is a major stumbling block. I'm not sure how that fits into the wider debate about what versions of underlying software Moodle requires/supports but personally I think Lucene-compatibility is very worthwile goal for many reasons.
Lucene could be interesting if it can compatible be GPL. It would be OK to make global search only work in Moodle when Moodle was running PHP5 (as "extra functionality"), as long as the interface disappeared quietly from view when Moodle was on PHP4. I think by the time this is finished that PHP5 will be fairly common even on web hosts. Martin Dougiamas 17:29, 2 June 2006 (WST)
Zend Lucene is distributed under the New BSD license. The licensing FAQ is here. --Michael Champanis 04:00, 3 June 2006 (WST)
I strongly recommend Tim Bray's On Search if you haven't already read it, really good stuff. --David Scotson 20:57, 30 May 2006 (WST)
Oh, the Lucene Web Service and Solr are also interesting, though replacing the need for PHP5 with the need for a Tomcat install. --David Scotson 21:04, 30 May 2006 (WST)
