Today a new version of Apache Solr was released, version 3.5.0. Here’s the release statement from the Lucene PMC:

Contributions from Cominvent include LanguageIdentifier, Plugging in Hunspell stemmer in Solr and SOLR-2742 which makes commitWithin more accessible through the SolrJ APIs. Also, Apache Tika is upgraded to version 0.10, fixing several bugs in parsing PDFs and Office documents.

The Apache way of developing open source software relies on an active community of users, contributors and developers. All of us can contribute in some way or another. Being a committer means that you participate actively in the software development work and have write access to the source code repository. Each project is lead by a the PMC (Project Management Committee) which consists of some of the committers taking an extra responsibility of staking out the future of the project. (more…)

It’s been a long wait, and now it’s here – the release of Solr version 3.1. The 1.4.1 release was in June 2010, and for various reasons there was never a 1.4.2 nor a 1.5 release. Part of the reason is the merge of Lucene and Solr codebase which is also why the version number is 3.1 instead of 1.5.

So what’s new? For me, the single most important features are the Extended Dismax parser (SOLR-1553) and Geospatial search. The full list of improvements is found in CHANGES.TXT, but here are my favorites:

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The brand new version 3.1 of Apache Solr was released yesterday.

We have created a 2-page Apache Solr product sheet, which very briefly (and beautifully) describes the high-level features of the popular search engine, including links for downloading and getting started.

Use it to explain to business persons and decision makers what open source search can do. This is the missing “glossy” merchandise piece of the puzzle if you like.

You are free to re-use the product sheet in your commercial business, as it is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, meaning you can even change it as long as you leave the credit and link to Cominvent in place and also share your changes under the same license in the ODF source form.

Download the Solr 3.1 product sheet (PDF).

And here is the Solr 3.1 product sheet master (ODT).

We held a talk at the Open Source Conference GoOpen 2011 in Oslo today, together with our customer NHST, represented by Hans Jørgen Hoel. The talk was about the process of migrating from FAST ESP to Apache Solr for all of NHST’s news publications and other data sources.

The presentation is in Norwegian.

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