The Apache Software Foundation

Hello Lucene users,

On behalf of the Lucene dev community (a growing community far larger than just the committers) I would like to announce the release of Lucene 2.9.

While we generally try and maintain full backwards compatibility between major versions, Lucene 2.9 has a variety of breaks that are spelled out in the 'Changes in backwards compatibility policy' section
of CHANGES.txt.

We recommend that you recompile your application with Lucene 2.9 rather than attempting to “drop” it in. This will alert you to any issues you may have to fix if you are affected by one of the backward
compatibility breaks. As always, its a really good idea to thoroughly read CHANGES.txt before upgrading.

Lucene 2.9 comes with a bevy of new features, including:

 * Per segment searching and caching (can lead to much faster reopen among other things)

 * Near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter

 * New Query types

 * Smarter, more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc)

 * A freshly optimized Collector/Scorer API

 * Improved Unicode support and the addition of Collation contrib

 * A new Attribute based TokenStream API

 * A new QueryParser framework in contrib with a core QueryParser replacement impl included.

 * Scoring is now optional when sorting by Field, or using a custom Collector, gaining sizable performance when scores are not required.

 * New analyzers (PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer, SmartChineseAnalyzer)

 * New fast-vector-highlighter for large documents

 * Lucene now includes high-performance handling of numeric fields.
   Such fields are indexed with a trie structure, enabling simple to use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.

 ---

And many, many more features, bug fixes, optimizations, and various improvements. You can find the full list of changes here:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Changes.html

Many changes have also occurred in Lucene's Contrib area:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Contrib-Changes.html

Binary and source distributions are available at
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/java/

Lucene artifacts are also available in the Maven2 repository at
http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/lucene/

The Next Release:

The next release will be Lucene 3.0. This should come along shortly, and will remove all of the deprecated code in Lucene 2.9. Lucene 3.0 will also be the first release to move from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5 as a requirement.

Thanks,

Mark Miller

Apache Portable Runtime 1.3.9 Released

  The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Portable Runtime Project are proud to announce the General Availability of version 1.3.9 of the APR Apache Portable Runtime library, and version 1.3.9 of the companion APR-util Apache Portable Utility library.

  The corresponding version 1.2.1 of the companion APR-iconv library, an alternative portable implementation of the 'iconv' library, remains current.

  APR is available for download from:

    http://apr.apache.org/download.cgi

  This version of APR is primarily a bug fix release, including fixes for specific platforms' configuration, feature detection, and run time behavior.  Most developers and users are encouraged to adopt the latest APR 1.x version to ensure the most comprehensive support and access to the latest features and enhancements.

  Note that the APR library release 1.3.8 introduced security fixes, users of prior versions are strongly cautioned to upgrade to a later release.

  The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime Project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations. The primary goal is to provide an API to which software developers may code and be assured of predictable
  if not identical behavior regardless of the platform on which their software is built, relieving them of the need to code special-case conditions to work around or take advantage of platform-specific deficiencies or features.

  APR and its companion libraries are implemented entirely in C and provide a common programming interface across a wide variety of operating system platforms without sacrificing performance.
  Currently supported platforms include:

    UNIX variants
    Windows
    Netware
    Mac OS X
    OS/2

  To give a brief overview, the primary core subsystems of APR 1.3 include the following:

    Atomic operations
    Dynamic Shared Object loading
    File I/O
    Locks (mutexes, condition variables, etc)
    Memory management (high performance allocators)
    Memory-mapped files
    Multicast Sockets
    Network I/O
    Shared memory
    Thread and Process management
    Various data structures (tables, hashes, priority queues, etc)

  For a more complete list, please refer to the following URLs:

    http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/modules.html
    http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/modules.html

  Users of APR 0.9 should be aware that migrating to the APR 1.x programming interfaces may require some adjustments; APR 1.x is neither source nor binary compatible with earlier APR 0.9 releases.
  Users of APR 1.x can expect consistent interfaces and binary backwards compatibility throughout the entire APR 1.x release cycle, as defined in our versioning rules:

    http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html

  APR is already used extensively by the Apache HTTP Server version 2 and the Subversion revision control system, to name but a few.  We list all known projects using APR at   http://apr.apache.org/projects.html -- so please let us know if you find our libraries useful in your own projects!