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Solr Digest, March 2010

As you probably already know, there were some big changes in Lucene/Solr world. They were already mentioned in Lucene Digest post for March, but here we’ll summarize changes related to Solr:

  • Lucene and Solr are now merged in svn, repositories are already created (you  can check interesting discussion on this thread)
  • Next Solr release could have a new major version number. There are conflicting opinions on what the version should be called, 1.5, 2.0 or 3.1 (following the name of the next Lucene release).  We are putting our money on it being version 2.0
  • Solr will soon move to Java 6
  • Deprecations in Solr code will finally be removed, which means transition to new version will not be as easy for users as it was from version 1.3 to 1.4
  • Solr and Lucene will not be changing their names, they remain two as two separate products

One interesting addition to Solr world is the new iPhone app called SolrStation. If you ever have a need to remotely administer your  Solr installation and you also own an iPhone or Android based phone, here is a tool you might find useful. It allows adminstators to:

  • Administer Solr installs
  • Manage data imports
  • Control replication

One thing to be careful about is security: what happens when you lose your phone? The “lucky” finder will have access to your Solr installation.  After some back-and-forth with Chris of SolrStation, Chris agreed adding additional security in form of  a pass code would be good to add and is putting that on the roadmap.  Soon, we’ll have a special post dedicated solely to SolrStation, to cover this interesting product in more details.

Solr just got integrated with Grails in the form of a plugin. This plugin integrates Grails domain model with Solr and is looking to provide functionalities of already existing Grails’ Searchable plugin and add some more. It is still in its infancy, so it is missing some key features like returning a list of domain objects in result set, but integration with Solr should improve Grails searching with capabilities like clustering, replication, scalability, facets…

Another interesting addition to Solr is Zoie plugin. It provides real-time update functionality to Solr 1.4. We’ll have a special post on Zoie, so we will not go into details here.

In Solr Digest February 2010, we covered RSolr scripting client for Ruby. This time we suggest looking at Solr Flux. This command-line interface for Solr speaks SQL, so if you ever wanted to use SQL-like syntax to insert or delete some documents or make a Solr query, this tool will enable you to do exactly that.

If you have a good knowledge of Solr and Mahout and want to contribute to Solr, check this thread, there is an opportunity with Google Summer of Code.

Thank you for reading.  You can also follow us on Twitter – @sematext.

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