Here’s the steps I took:

1. Download and “install” (aka unzip) Apache Solr 3.3.0
2. Launch Solr (cd example; java -jar start.jar)
3. Index files

That’s it.  Here’s the indexing script I used:

require 'net/http'
 
@dir = Dir.new("/Users/erikhatcher/apache-solr-3.3.0/docs")
 
@url = URI.parse("http://localhost:8983/solr")
@connection = Net::HTTP.new(@url.host, @url.port)
 
def index(filename)
@connection.get(@url.path + "/update/extract?stream.file=#{filename}&literal.id=#{filename}")
end
 
def commit
@connection.get(@url.path + "/update?commit=true")
end
 
@dir.each {|name|
  f = "#{@dir.path}/#{name}"
  if File.file?(f)
    puts "Indexing #{f}..."
    index(f)
  end
}
 
puts "Committing..."
commit
 
puts "Done!"

To make it look prettier, only a little dabbling with the templates is needed – add your company logo, customize the colors. And a change to the example (/browse handler) configuration to facet on content_type will allow you to easily search just within documents of specific types through the included UI.  The example code above indexed the docs that ship with Apache Solr 3.3.0; just change the path to a directory of yours to index your own content.

Looking forward to seeing you there. Everyone in attendance will not only get to hear about the latest greatest enhancements to these technologies, but may also walk away with a cool Lucid t-shirt!

Here are the slides for “Rapid Prototyping with Solr”:

My next talk, titled “Solr Recipes”, was a 3 hour workshop covering the common ways to get data into Solr, configure it, and leverage it within applications.

Here are the “Solr Recipes” slides:

And finally, to a few hardcore folks, I discussed “Lucene for Solr Developers”, which more broadly covered the various ways to extend Solr. One cool example (or so I think, at least) I built for this talk that I’ve put out there as food for thought is “auto-faceting”, having a way for Solr to determine the best facets to select for a given query. See SOLR-2641 for my initial proof-of-concept implementation.

Here are the “Lucene for Solr Developers” slides:

There was so much going on that I barely got to tap into the conference experience myself, with the best part being the conversations had during meals, and between and during the scheduled talks. I was able to reconnect with many long-time friends that I’ve made through No Fluff, Just Stuff, and made many new acquaintances – I won’t name names, as this list covers most of them.

Thank you, Überconf, Jay, and fellow speakers and attendees for a stellar technical event. If you missed it, don’t despair, No Fluff, Just Stuff brings many of the same speakers and topics to an area near you. I’ll be speaking at a few NFJS events during the second half of this year, including Raleigh, NC, Boston, MA, and, surely to rival the quality and size of Überconf, The Rich Web Experience in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

Let’s talk.

This time around, the data set I chose was Data.gov’s catalog of datasets, which fit with the ApacheCon open source aura, and Lucid Imagination’s support of Open Source for America, which helps to advocate for open source in the US Federal Government.  The prototype built includes faceting browsing, query term suggest, hit highlighting, result clustering, spell checking, document detail, and a bonus Venn diagram visualization.

The prototype was built with these steps:

1. Install LucidWorks for Solr
2. Grab the Data.gov catalog CSV file
3. Iterate a bit with Solr’s CSV update handler (the funnest way to get data into Solr) and a little Solr schema tinkering
4. Adjusted the Solr configuration and UI templates to get a nice look and feel, adding in a document detail page and a Venn diagram visualization comparing query overlaps

Voilà (click the images for large view):

This isn’t the first time we’ve toyed with Data.gov data… earlier this year, Hoss demonstrated Solr’s stats component on another of Data.gov’s data sets.

My ApacheCon slides are published at Slideshare and embedded here:

All the code and instructions for running the entire prototype yourself can be found here: https://github.com/erikhatcher/solr-rapid-prototyping/tree/master/ApacheCon2010

I’ve posted a Lucene related event schedule on my blog for people who are interested.  Of particular note are the two days of pre-conference training on both Lucene and Solr.  These are shorter ApacheCon versions of our 3 day training classes.  Obviously, we can’t cover all the material that we do in our full courses, but they are a means for people who are attending the conference or who are in the vicinity to get some Solr and Lucene training.  Of course, if you can’t make it to ApacheCon, we’d be happy to discuss alternative training opportunities.  In fact, last year, I did an on-site training at a company in Europe right around conference time.  Just drop us a line at training@lucidimagination.com and we can see what works out.