The next JavaMUG meeting is on December 14th 2011. Erik Hatcher from Lucid Imagination will be presenting at the event. He will talk about Apache Solr, its features and benefits. This will be an introductory to Solr talk.

Apache Solr serves search requests at enterprises and the largest companies around the world. Built on top of the top–notch Apache Lucene library, Solr makes indexing and searching integration into your applications straightforward.

Solr provides faceted navigation, spell checking, highlighting, clustering, grouping, and other search features. Solr also scales query volume with replication and collection size with distributed capabilities. Solr can index rich documents such as PDF, Word, HTML, and other file types.

For more details on time and location, visit http://javamug.org/.

Lucid Imagination recently hosted the first San Francisco Apache Mahout User Meeting on November 29th 2011. The 3 hours session was packed with talks by Grant Ingersoll from Lucid Imagination and Ted Dunning of MapR Technologies followed by networking, food and drinks. Session slides and videos are now available.

The first talk was given by Grant Ingersoll and he focused on using Mahout to cluster, classify and recommend email. Followed by a demonstration of using scripts packaged with Mahout. Here are the slides for this session.

The second talk was given by Ted Dunning who talked about how using random projections in machine learning can benefit performance without sacrificing quality. Session slides available here.

• Introduction, By Doug Cutting, Cloudera/ASF
• Solr 4.0 Highlights, By Mark Miller, Lucid Imagination
  This talk covers some of the new features and advancements that users can look forward to in Solr 4. The list of topics will include: performance optimizations, further support for near-realtime search, SolrCloud, DirectSolrSpellChecker, and more.
• Lucene-based Search at Greplin, By Mike Cvet, Greplin
  Greplin is a 'search' company that has many billions of documents sharded across hundreds of servers. Greplin adds around 2000 documents/second to their index, and well over 5,000/second at peak load.  This talk expands on the "Thousands of Indexes In The Cloud" Lightning Talk given by Shaneal at Lucene Revolution 2011.
• Improved Search with Lucene 4.0, By Robert Muir, Lucid Imagination
  This talk describes how you can apply some of Lucene 4's new features (such as flexible indexing, scoring improvements, column-stride fields) to improve your search application.

• Search Industry Trends, LucidWorks Enterprise Introduction and Demonstration by Marc Krellenstein, CTO & Founder, Lucid Imagination
• Iterative introduction of Solr into an existing environment by Thomas Kwiatkowski, IT-Produktentwicklung, Teamleitung Suche & Marketing, Immobilien Scout GmbH:
• Solr Case Study by Olaf Zschiedrich, eBay Germany