Going Solr

Over the last couple of weeks, we whipped-up an enterprise search site using Apache Solr. It was a fantastic experience. Solr is impressive. My first proper exposure to full text search (FTS) technology was via its inclusion in a recent version of PostgreSQL (see earlier post). I quickly learned that incorporating FTS does wonders for user satisfaction. So upon discovering the large number of public websites that are Solr Powered, we had to take Solr for a spin ourselves. We were not disappointed.

Some interesting notes about our experience:

• Solr is not a turn-key solution; it's a search engine for a solution you create.
• Doing the tutorial was critical to understanding Solr.
• XSLT worked great for rendering Solr's XML results.
• Some helpful documentation sources we found:
  o Apache Solr (tutorial and presentations);
  o Lucid Imagination (lucidworks ref guide); and
  o w3schools.com (xslt tutorial).
• Solr is lightning fast.
• Solr is packed with enterprise features. However, like most open source tools, you must have an adventurous spirit to realize them.
• Jetty makes deploying web / app servers simple. Launching the Solr example app was literally a one-liner. Incredible.

Tip: If you're implementing an enterprise search engine, consider using Apache Solr.

20 Jan 2012 Update - Posted the detailed 'how-to' for indexing office documents with Solr (source code and all). Enjoy.