An Experimental Objective-C Port of Lucene 5.x

ObjCLucene is an experimental Objective-C port of Lucene. The port is done by using Google's j2objc, and the goal is to make the porting process applicable to subsequent versions of Lucene.

A sample app can be found here: LuceneSearchDemo-iOS.

Currently an Xcode project is provided to build the static library of all the translated Lucene packages:

• lucene-analyzers-common (but without those that need BreakIterator)
• lucene-core
• lucene-highlighter
• lucene-join
• lucene-memory
• lucene-misc (but no org.apache.lucene.store.*)
• lucene-queries
• lucene-queryparser
• lucene-sandbox
• lucene-suggest

The resulting library is huge and may not be suitable for making apps intended for the App Store.

This should be considered an experimental project, and there are a number of issues that I've already found:

• The translated AnalyzingInfixSuggester does not produce correct suggestion indices. It reads indices built elsewhere fine. I don't know why that is so. Perhaps some byte ordering or some Java-to-Objective-C nuances involved.
• Highlighting is slow in the translated code.

Please see the Mobile Lucene project for more information.

Building the Xcode Project

To build the Xcode project, set up the J2ObjC dependencies first. If you haven't installed it, download version 2.8 from its GitHub releases page. After you have made sure that the command j2objc exists in your PATH, run the script:

./setup-j2objc.sh

This creates a symlink to where your j2objc lives and enables the project to be built correctly.