Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story. Read the rest of this entry »

After the Microsoft takeover of FAST almost three years ago, it’s been silent and no new updates of ESP. We all know that MS discontinued Linux support, and that the major focus with the FAST technology has been to power the high-end search for Sharepoint 2010. ESP was forked and heavily modified to integrate smoothly with Windows, SQL server, AD, PowerShell and more, and it made the leap to 64 bit – finally!

But what about non Sharepoint users? MS has an offering to them as well, called FAST Search for Internet Sites. Read Comperio’s excellent blog article about it. A bit disappointing that the core is still the more than three year old ESP5.3 wrapped in new MS APIs, but cool that you can still hack the ESP internals.. Read the rest of this entry »

A considerable part of Cominvent’s projects the last years have been migrations from FAST ESP to Solr. Some customers have a cost saving focus while others need a search engine on Linux. Anyhow, with more than 10 years of FAST experience, Cominvent is an authority in this field, securing a smooth transition.

As an example, we recently migrated the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv and several other online newspapers from FAST to Solr, including Norwegian linguistics and Escenic integration.

Our friends in Lucid Imagination will host a free webinar on this topic on November 18th, don’t miss it if you want to hear more success stories.

Also see our migration slides.

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.