Solr vs Hibernate Search - Which to choose and When?

Question

We are building an ecommerce application. We are using JAVA stack with Hibernate and Spring Framework. As with all ecommerce application, we need to build search capability

Answer 1

In addition to what has been said, when in a clustered environment:

Hibernate-search:

Cons:

• Requires a master/slave combination which isn't always feasible, specially when your build/deployment process doesn't distinguish among the nodes (same war for all nodes).
• The indexes are hosted in the same server/process as the application running Hibernate, so you have one index per application node. This is sometimes overkill.
• It isn't real-time search, unless the load balancer uses session stickiness.

Pros:

• Zero to little configuration. Just drop the jar in the classpath.
• The bridge between Hibernate and Lucene is very straight forward. Just annotate the Entities and voilá!

Solr/SolrCloud:

• It is decoupled of the application it self.
• Not real-time search, just as hibernate-search.
• Requires restart to change the schema.
• SolrCloud isn't exactly the easiest framework to configure.
• No straight forward Hibernate bridge. You have to code your own Hibernate listener and bind them to post-[insert|delete|update] events (or find an open source one)

ElasticSearch

• Servers are independent of the application, just like solr.
• It is by far the easiest to configure in a cluster/cloud.
• It is real-time
• No straight forward Hibernate bridge, as well. (es-hibernate-connector on GitHub)

Personally I prefer ElasticSearch when running in the cloud.