Cominvent AS - Enterprise search consultants » Java

Becoming a committer

janhoy — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:26:43 +0000

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.

I’ve been actively participating in the Lucene/Solr community for a few years: Answering questions on the solr-user and dev mailing lists, reporting bugs, uploading patches etc. This week I was invited by the PMC as a committer on the Lucene/Solr project, joining the twenty-something other existing committers. I’m honored of this invite, which also shows that the ASF works as a true meritocracy, those who show persistent contribution over time will be given more responsibility.

Looking forward to my first commit and many more to come, improving an already great code base. If you have a JIRA issue you’d like me to work on, please suggest one in the comment field!

Turbulent Java times

janhoy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:49:07 +0000

Times have been turbulent in the Java camp since Oracle took over Sun, trying to make Java a less open specification. Well, now the Apache Software Foundation has made real their promise to leave the JCP EC if Oracle continued its ego-play with Java, not listening to the community.

But what’s the future now for Java and as importantly all the Open Source projects based on Java? much will depend on Oracle’s own actions in the next months. Personally I hope that their bullying around will start to hurt so much in their brand perception and customer satisfaction polls, that they desperately see the need for a new Open Source strategy, cooperating with the developers instead of fighting them.

However, by the time Ellison & co lands on this decision, I fear that it will already be too late to unify Java. The majority of the Java development community including Google and hopefully IBM, will have laid out a plan to revive the Java comminity on their own.

In his very interesting blog post “The case for a new Apache/Google “Java”“, Sola plays with one scenario where a new Java-like programming language based on Harmony takes over the whole eco-system, and that ASF deprecates the Java versions of all projects. Wow, drastic move but it could maybe work?

Can Oracle stop Java from opening up?

janhoy — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:25:57 +0000

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.

Cominvent pioneers Solr Training in Scandinavia

janhoy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:17:33 +0000

Cominvent is the first company in Scandinavia to offer professional classroom training for the Open Source search engine Apache Solr. Last week we conducted a training in Denmark, and we plan for a regular schedule in Oslo and on-demand elsewhere in Europe.

The training material, developed by Lucid Imagination, is recently updated to cover Solr 1.4, plus some additional contrib features like Carot2 clustering. The handout comprises more than 400 slides, but fear not – there are plenty of labs and room for Q&A and discussions, which makes the pace comfortable.

Soon to come is an advanced training class covering more complex issues such as performance tuning, scaling, plugin development etc. Stay tuned!

Read more at www.solrtraining.com and also follow us on Twitter.

Apache Solr has become grown-up

janhoy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:13:43 +0000

The open source search server Solr from Apache Foundation has become a mature technology ready for prime-time.

The recent editions has added features which previously were only found in commercial offerings, such as

Automatic replication for large installations with distributed search
Java-API (SolrJ)
Conversion of Office-documents
Full faceted search
Advanced tokenization, highlighting and stemming

Apache Solr is being adopted more widely, and some companies even start replacing their expensive commercial engine with Solr with good results. In that way they can spend less on licenses and more on content quality and tuning.

Feeling ready to try Solr? Contact us for a talk, or download it yourself and try the tutorial. Here’s a short video introducing you to the basics:

I will soon write about how to obtain professional support for Apache Solr.

Norweigan search portal Sesam.no releases middleware as GPL

janhoy — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:04:38 +0000

In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.

Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:

“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”

Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!

Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!

PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com