Solr

Checking examples in “Solr Indexing” with Solr 4.7 under Windows – part 1

It’s been 9 months since my introductory Solr book came out. It was written for version 4.3. In the meanwhile, Solr kept marching on and is now at version 4.7. There has been quite a number of changes and new features. So I really wanted to recheck that the examples in the book still make sense.  I also wanted to do the tests on Windows to see whether the *nix-centered instructions in the book caused any issues.

This first part covers the issues and supplementary material based on the review of the first five chapters. Later parts will be covered in other blog posts. So far, it seems that the examples survived without any serious issues.

Solr Start – resources for Apache Solr users

If you are using Solr, you should check out Solr Start. It has a full list of UpdateRequestProcessors, every Analyzer, Tokenizer, and Filter shipped with Solr and a searchable version of Lucene and Solr Javadocs.

Solr Usability Contest – one week in

It has been just over a week since launching Solr Usability Contest. It is doing well. There are 25 suggestions, more than 150 visits, and quite a number of votes.

The most popular suggestion so far is Better Documentation. This is both easy to predict and a bit sad. From my own experience, there is quite a bit of documentation about Solr on the web, but it might be a little hard to find. Some of the best stuff actually hides in videos and slideshows, so may not even be easily visible to Google. And then, there are books - also not indexable (see relevant suggestion). Some of those books  are quite comprehensive. And, of course, for the advanced material, the source code is self-documenting on the most basic level, yet again not something Google can search effectively (use other search engines for that).