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.

So what are some of the improvements in 1.4?

Apache Tika integration

One of the more useful news for those doing intranet search is the integration with Tika (or Solr Cell), which is a document parsing component which can read MS Office formats, PDF and more.

Improved performance

You will get improved faceting speed for free, and with a small change in the schema, you will also benefit from greatly improved integer (and float, date) range searches. This is due to a smarter internal implementation, so instead of expanding an integer range into an OR of ALL discrete string values in the range. Say you want to search the range 0-1234. In v1.3 that would expand into an OR of (0, 1, 2, 3, 4…1229, 1230, 1231, 1232, 1233, 1234). For simplicity lets pretend the implementation split along 10-decimalsthe range prefixed th for thousand, hu for hundred, te for ten, and substitute “full” ranges, then the new OR will be (th0, hu0, hu1, te0, te1, te2, 1230, 1231, 1232, 1233, 1234), thereby reducing number of terms from thousands to tens.

Easier index replication

Replicating your index for large systems has not been for the amateur so far, needing to setup all nodes manually (no installer support) as well as scripts for rsyncing index to slaves. In 1.4 the default index replication is by Java process-to-process, so it is easier to setup, and will also work on Windows!

And more

There are also more news, such as Lucene improvements which Solr also benefits from. Read more here.

So look out for Solr 1.4 on a website near you…