Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

lindex

The new DevNet Resource Kit on Macromedia.com contains a utility called lindex (supposedly short for Lucene Index), allowing developers to create full text searching applications using ColdFusion on any platform that supports Java… very cool.

I’m relatively certain it’s been discussed to death before, but why charge for this kind of stuff? The lindex component above wouldn’t be that hard to do and was probably hacked by Christian Cantrell in his spare time for fun… give it away. Macromedia isn’t in the business of selling tutorials and snippets. They sell boxed product last time I checked. Anyway…

I’m probably a bit biased - but why give it away? Some of the CF content on the DRK was certainly NOT done in a few hours in the spare time. It represents some significant work. Certainly the Flash stuff is pretty intense as well.

Of course, I’m not a big fan of the “If it’s not free, it’s evil” folks. I don’t think you fall in that camp, but I simply don’t understanding the thinking that paying for software is some mortal sin.

Anyway, that was off topic.

Well.. for what it’s worth the MXNA product is the Fullasagoog (http://www.fullasagoog.com/) code base — and it’s certainly not something anyone is going to whip up in an afternoon.

Apart from the obvious benefits of the application, you’d be surprised to find it runs on Windows, Linux, CFMX for J2EE etc without a single modification. A lot of work has gone into bulletproofing the code and delivering something really useful in a business sense — as opposed to simply some sort of programming curiosity.

I’m not a big fan of the “If it’s not free, it’s evil” mentality either, but something about charging for a thin translation layer around a complex open source product seems against the whole spirit of community. Doug Cutting and others have sacrificed a lot to make Lucene what it is today. To charge for the last couple of hundred lines of code is to disrespect the giants whose shoulders Lindex stands on.

It doesn’t bother me that they’re charging for the other stuff in DNK but I really wish they had made Lindex (and CFunit, for that matter) free. Anyway, no matter–others will step in and make it free (as AJ has started to already with CFX_Lucene).

Also… is there any advantage to using Verity over Lucene? If not, why don’t they bundle Lucene instead?

That’s a good point about Lucene, Joe, didn’t even think about that perspective. AJ - I do hope you continue to develop your CFX (heck, why not consider making it a native CFML custom tag so people don’t have to install it in the admin).

>> why not consider making it a native CFML custom tag so people don’t have to install it in the admin

How would you do this Ray? I don’t see anything the CFMX docs about making a native CFML tag.

>> something about charging for a thin translation layer around a complex open source product seems against the whole spirit of community

— of course, where do you draw the line on ‘thin translation layer’…. CFMX includes the Apache Axis SOAP implementation. Is that added value or a thin translation layer? Who cares?

Interesting to note too that the Firefly components included in the DRK were actually purchased from another company, so of course they(MM) have to sell the DRK…