Finally, after long delays, Apache Solr version 1.4 is released. The long delay was mainly due to very strict quality standards, which made it necessary to wait until some serious known bugs were dealt with. Also read my previous article on what’s new in this version. Here is the official release statement:

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

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Some people are perhaps more comfortable learning through a book than through Wiki pages and README files.

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

I was in SF, California last week to dig deeper into Solr and to meet with its core developers (now working for Lucid Imagination). It was a great week with many new connections and new insight.

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.

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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.

Open Source Software (OSS) and free software has been an alternative to commercial, licensed software for decades. Most known and successful are perhaps projects like GNU/Linux (licensed under the GNU General Public License, GPL), OpenOffice.org, Apache web server and MySQL. They have all managed to produce excellent, high-quality, stable software with an impressive wide-spread use. Other well known projects that are also Open Source are Java programming language, Norwegian TrollTech’s (now Nokia) Qt, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, eZ Publish, and the list goes on.

For Search, there are a few players picking up speed that you should be aware of:

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