This document is intended as a "getting started" guide. It has three basic audiences: novices looking to install Apache Lucene on their application or web server, developers looking to modify or base the applications they develop on Lucene, and developers looking to become involved in and contribute to the development of Lucene. This document is written in tutorial and walkthrough format. It intends to help you in "getting started", but does not go into great depth into some of the conceptual or inner details of Apache Lucene.

Each section listed below builds on one another. That being said more advanced users may wish to skip sections.

• About the basic Lucene demo and its usage. This section is intended for anyone who wants a basic background on using the provided Lucene demos.
• About the sources and implementation for the basic Lucene demo section we walk through . This section is intended for developers.
• About installing and configuring the template web application. While this walkthrough assumes Tomcat 4.0.x as your container of choice, there is no reason you can't (provided you have the requisite knowledge) adapt the instructions to your container. This section is intended for those responsible for the development or deployment of Lucene-based web applications.
• About the sources used to construct the template web application. Please note the template application is designed to highlight features of Lucene and is not an example of best practices. (One would hopefully use MVC architecture such as provided by Jakarta Struts and taglibs, or better yet XML with stylesheets, but showing you how to do that would be WAY beyond the scope of this demonstration. Additionally one could cache results, and perform other performance optimizations, but those are beyond the scope of this demo). This section is intended for developers and those wishing to customize the template web application to their needs. The sections useful to developers only are clearly delineated.