Enterprise Search ExpertsWe 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.
Open Source Search is gaining more and more traction. First you had Lucene (2001), giving great search for programmers. Then we got Solr (2006) making search accessible for non programmers, but a certain level of expertise is still needed. And then came Constellio, an open source (GPL) enterprise search distribution (distro) built on Solr, adding a slick GUI, connector and crawling support and more.
I call it “distro” because I like to compare the evolution to what we have seen in GNU/Linux. First there was the Linux core. Then there was the GNU tools that made Linux so much more usable but still only for engineers comfortable with the command line. And last, companies like RedHat and Suse built complete distros including modern GUI, ready-to use tools such as OpenOffice, Thunderbird and more. Without these distros, Linux would just have been a “core” leaving to the user to add the extra sugar. (more…)
There is an exciting war going on about the future openness of the Java platform. Oracle is trying to capitalize on its ownership/stewardship of Java, by starting to charge for their enterprise version of the JVM, as well as stopping its competitors like Google to succeed with Java. Oracle wants to make Java more closed for their own economical benefit – an act which just hurts the community, users, developers and Oracle’s own customers.
The latest move is by the Apache Software Foundation, whose Apache licensed “Harmony” implementation of the JVM is being banned by Oracle because they want OpenJDK to be the only open implementation of Java (obviously to make sure there is a reason to purchase JRockit from Oracle and to keep control). Apache this week threatens to leave the JCP (Java Community Process) if Oracle does not grant the Harmony project it’s legal right to the TCK.
Personally I cheer for Apache and hope the other JCP members will back the claim, and with the help of Google (and hopefully IBM) eventually see a true open model for the stewardship of Java, including an Apache licensed JVM for anyone to use freely. At the end of the day that will give Java a huge boost and attract more developers.
Jan Høydahl will be speaking at Lucene EuroCon in Prague May 20-21st 2010. EuroCon is a new annual conference hosted by Lucid Imagination. In this event the majority of the Lucene/Solr community will come together discussing how search can improve findability & revenue for various types of businesses.
Jan will be speaking about “Key topics when migrating from FAST to Solr”, pitched towards a Solr audience. There will be a short overview of FAST ESP, and a walkthrough of the migration process including what pain-points you could expect and how to handle them.
Welcome to join Cominvent and FindWise in a breakfast seminar in Oslo May 5th, with the topic “Cost effective and flexible search solutions based on open source”.
The seminar is at Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel in Oslo, between 8-10am wednesday May 5th.
Join us for a discussion around these topics:
We’ll also present a few customer cases to highlight successful implementation of open source enterprise search.
See the attached invitation (PDF, Norwegian) for more.