Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server - Softcover

Smiley, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849516065 ISBN 13: 9781849516068

Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd, 2011

Synopsis

Enhance your search with faceted navigation, result highlighting, relevancy ranked sorting, and more

• Comprehensive information on Apache Solr 3 with examples and tips so you can focus on the important parts
• Integration examples with databases, web-crawlers, XSLT, Java and embedded-Solr, PHP and Drupal, JavaScript, Ruby frameworks
• Advice on data modeling, deployment considerations to include security, logging, and monitoring, and advice on scaling Solr and measuring performance
• An update of the best-selling title on Solr 1.4

In Detail

If you are a developer building an app today then you know how important a good search experience is. Apache Solr, built on Apache Lucene, is a wildly popular open source enterprise search server that easily delivers powerful search and faceted navigation features that are elusive with databases. Solr supports complex search criteria, faceting, result highlighting, query-completion, query spell-check, relevancy tuning, and more.

Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server is a comprehensive reference guide for every feature Solr has to offer. It serves the reader right from initiation to development to deployment. It also comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate Solr with other languages and frameworks.

Through using a large set of metadata about artists, releases, and tracks courtesy of the MusicBrainz.org project, you will have a testing ground for Solr, and will learn how to import this data in various ways. You will then learn how to search this data in different ways, including Solr's rich query syntax and "boosting" match scores based on record data.

Finally, we'll cover various deployment considerations to include indexing strategies and performance-oriented configuration that will enable you to scale Solr to meet the needs of a high-volume site.

What you will learn from this book

• Design a schema to include text indexing details like tokenization, stemming, and synonyms
• Import data using various formats like CSV, XML, and from databases, and extract text from common document formats
• Search using Solr's rich query syntax, perform geospatial searches, and influence relevancy order
• Enhance search results with faceting, query spell-checking, auto-completing queries, highlighted search results, and more
• Integrate a host of technologies with Solr from the server side to client-side JavaScript, to frameworks like Drupal
• Scale Solr by learning how to tune it and how to use replication and sharding

Approach

The book is written as a reference guide. It includes fully working examples based on a real- world public data set.

Who this book is written for

This book is for developers who want to learn how to use Apache Solr in their applications. Only basic programming skills are needed.

About this title

About the Authors

Born to code, David Smiley is a senior software engineer, book author, conference speaker, and instructor. He has 12 years of experience in the defense industry at MITRE, specializing in Java and Web technologies. David is the principal author of 'Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server', the first book on Solr, published by PACKT in 2009. He also developed and taught a two-day course on Solr for MITRE. David plays a lead technical role in a large-scale Solr project in which he has implemented geospatial search based on geohash prefixes, wildcard ngram query parsing, searching multiple multi-valued fields at coordinated positions, part-of-speech search using Lucene payloads, and other things. David consults as a Solr expert on numerous projects for MITRE and its government sponsors. He has contributed code to Lucene and Solr and is active in the open-source community. Prior to his Solr work, David first used Lucene back in 2000, as well as Hibernate-Search and Compass since then. He also used the competing Endeca commercial product, too, but hopes to never use it again.

Fascinated by the 'craft' of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past five years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we solve the problem of finding answers in datasets when we don't know the questions ahead of time to ask. In biotech, financial services, and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source search software. As a speaker, he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices with a focus on testing in search engine implementation. Eric became involved with Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! The patch was subsequently cleaned up and enhanced by three other individuals, demonstrating the power of the open source model to build great code collaboratively. SOLR-284 was eventually refactored into Solr Cell as part of Solr version 1.4. He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1849516065
• ISBN 13: 9781849516068
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 418