7.1. What is Tika?

Tika was added to the Lucene umbrella in October 2008, after graduating from the Apache incubator, which is the process newly created projects go through to become an Apache project. The most recent release as of this writing is 0.6. Development continues at a rapid pace, and it’s expected there will be non-backward-compatible changes in the march to the 1.0 release, so be sure to check Tika’s website at http://lucene.apache.org/tika for the latest documentation.

Tika is a framework that hosts plug-in parsers for each supported document type. The framework presents the same standard API to the application for extracting text and metadata from a document, and under the hood the plug-in parser interacts with the external library using the custom API exposed by that library. This lets your application use the same uniform API regardless of document type. When you need to extract text from a document, Tika finds the right parser for the document (details on this shortly).