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!

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).

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?

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.

Perhaps it’s time for a faster, bigger, more feature rich, more extensible or more affordable search engine? A migration requires good and structured planning and deep knowledge of the existing solution as well as the target technology.

With almost 10 years of full-time, hands-on consulting experience within all kinds of enterprise search solutions, Jan Høydahl at Cominvent has what it takes. See our new migration page for more info.

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 1.4 has been released and is now available for
public download! http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search
platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include
powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search,
dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g.,
Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed
search and index replication, and it powers the search and
navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search
server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the
Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and
search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy
to use from virtually any programming language. Solr’s powerful
external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type
of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin
architecture when more advanced customization is required.

New Solr 1.4 features include
- Major performance enhancements in indexing, searching, and
  faceting
- Revamped all-Java index replication that’s simple to configure
  and can replicate config files
- Greatly improved database integration via the DataImportHandler
- Rich document processing (Word, PDF, HTML) via Apache Tika
- Dynamic search results clustering via Carrot2
- Multi-select faceting (support for multiple items in a single
  category to be selected)
- Many powerful query enhancements, including ranges over arbitrary
  functions, and nested queries of different syntaxes
- Many other plugins including Terms for auto-suggest, Statistics,
  TermVectors, Deduplication

Getting Started
---------------
New to Solr? Follow the steps below to get up and running ASAP.

1. Download Solr at http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/
2. Check out the tutorial at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html
3. Read the Solr wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/solr) to learn more
4. Join the community by subscribing to solr-user@lucene.apache.org
5. Give Back (Optional, but encouraged!)
   See http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute

For more information on Apache Solr, see http://lucene.apache.org/solr

Release-declaration sourced from Grant Ingersoll’s blog.

Cominvent delivers training on Solr 1.4.

For years we’ve had books about Lucene, and now comes the first book about Apache Solr as well, titled Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server.

The book is written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh and is available for pre-order from Amazon. We’ll  post a review once we’ve read it. Until then, read more about the book from the authors at Amazon.

Update: Packt Publishing is sending me a copy of the book, and if you order it from this link I’ll even get a share

First of all, as you may know, Lucid Imagination is at the moment the primary commercial marketers, promotors and evangelists for Solr. They bring to the scene what an open source offering often lacks – a professional and polished image, nice wrapping and not least – commercial support. That is great for the future adoption of Solr with customers that need just that kind of safety. Being Lucid’s Norwegian parner, Cominvent AS now offers all of this in Norway as well.

In the upcoming version 1.4 of Solr, there are a lot of good stuff. Let me ierate some of them:

• Better built-in support for replication to multi node
• Improved performance of facets (navigators)
• Greatly improved performance of numeric sort and range queries
• A number of bug fixes
• Import of Word, Excel, PPT, PDF +++ formats through Tikka

This promises good for the enterprise use case, which both needs scalability and multiple document format support. The new index replication feature is implemented in Java and is socket based, promising to work on all platforms. The old implementation was script+rsync based and would only work on *NIX systems.

Also, being able to work with MS Office document formats is important. There might be commercial document conversion filters which support more formats and at a better quality, but having a free open alternative by default and an commercial upgrade path is all about choice and flexibility, isn’t it?

Cominvent AS, an independent search consulting company, is partnering with Lucid Imagination, offering professional support and training to the Norwegian market. We also offer consulting- and training services for FAST ESP.

So you are thinking of adopting open source search Solr or Lucene, but are reluctant because of the lack of support fom the open source world?

Or perhaps you are already using Apache Solr or Lucene in your organization, and would like to have an expert partner to support you with your current solution and to help you refine your search solution to better fit your needs and to give better results and performance.

We at Cominvent AS are experts in search and experts in Apache Solr and Lucene. But being a small organization we have not offered support contracts until now. We are now pleased to announce that Cominvent AS, through our partnership with Lucid Imagination, can offer you commercial support, consulting and training. Lucid Imagination was the first commercial entity to offer professional paid support for the Apache Lucene and Solr products, and some of the most skilled coders and engineers are associated with them.

Please contact us for a talk about your needs.