As I mentioned, I am taking a look at SWISH-E in my spare time, because at one time, I didn't want to go through the hassle/risk of upgrading gcc et. al. on my machine, but after looking through the code in SWISH-E, I am rethinking my priorities.
I would like to have a search page that returns either (a) an abstract of each document, or (b) a piece of the document containing the search words.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for using SWISH-E is that
returning an abstract appears to be relatively straight forward operation (you do have to create the abstract as part of a document's meta tags and store it within the index), and undoable w/o a great deal of enery at the moment with SWISH++. (b) appears undoable with either SWISH-E and SWISH++.
While I am not fond of the code I've seen in SWISH-E, I find the documentation on how to run and setup the system much more complete.
A brief glance suggests that SWISH-E appears to be "one genuine open source project" complete with developers mailing list and CVS. While it's GPL and while there is a yahoo mailing lists, SWISH++ appears to be much more a one man show. Frankly, that may be better!
With no other knowledge, it's a crap shoot for me to tell where the time is best spent. Which project will do better in the long run? The one with the most features? The best code? The open source methodology? The one man visionary? Dunno. What are your thoughts?
