[hibernate-dev] [Search] Exposing NumericField

[Sanne Grinovero]

It took us a long time to have the concept of "NumericField" fully
exposed to Hibernate Search users, as a primary concept people are
getting familiar with.

Which means of course that the Lucene team is going to get rid of them
in the near future: [1].

NumericField(s) will live for a bit longer in a "backwards-codec"
package, and to be fair the migration makes sense for Lucene as the
new alternative structure is delivering much better performance across
the board (less indexing time, better query times, less index space,
...).

So what I'm wondering now is if it was a mistake to expose this.
For sure since we're up to redesign the API soon we should keep this
in mind, but also while we traditionally made "the best choice"
automatically out of the box about how to translate certain types to
the index world, we always allowed for power users to override our
defaults.

So what's the correct level of abstraction here?

We want to allow power users to use specifics, but not keep breaking
APIs. Or should we just accept that such level of details will keep
changing?

Ideas very welcome..

Thanks,
Sanne

1 - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-6917