Search was once considered a black-box application that ingested content and delivered results to users opaquely. However, driven by the opportunities and demands of the growing universe of content and by the versatility of Solr/Lucene open source search technology, search applications are evolving from a standalone facility to an enabling framework.http://www.lucidimagination.com/developer/whitepapers/search-readiness-checklist
What are the main characteristics of E Commerce search and why Apache Solr is one of the best search engines to power ecommerce websites.
Characteristics of E-Commerce Search
Solr: History
Solr: A Brief
Why Solr?
Solr System
Features of Solr
Users
Resources
http://www.thepcwizard.in/p/about-me-and-blog.html
What are the main characteristics of E Commerce search and why Apache Solr is one of the best search engines to power ecommerce websites.
Characteristics of E-Commerce Search
Solr: History
Solr: A Brief
Why Solr?
Solr System
Features of Solr
Users
Resources
http://www.thepcwizard.in/p/about-me-and-blog.html
Do you need an external search platform for Adobe Experience Manager?therealgaston
Experience Manager provides some basic search capabilities out of the box. In this talk, we'll explore an external search platform for implementing an Experience Manager powered, search-driven site. As an example, we will use Apache Solr as a reference implementation and describe best practices for indexing content, exposing non-Experience Manager content via search, delivering search-driven experiences, and deploying the solution in a production setting.
Webinar: Lucidworks + Thomson Reuters for Improved Investment PerformanceLucidworks
Learn how the Lucidworks Fusion and Thomson Reuters Intelligent Tagging joint solution can help financial services professionals make better, faster investment decisions.
In just a few short years, search has quickly evolved from being a small text box in the nether regions of a website to being front and center in our lives. Increasingly, however, search engine technology is also being used for practical, real time recommendations, events processing, complex spatial functionality and time series analysis capable of not only matching user's queries in text, but also driving real time decision making and analytics. In fact, open source Apache Lucene/Solr can do all of this and more by taking advantage of new data structures and algorithms that complement more traditional IR approaches. In this demo-driven talk, Lucene committer Grant Ingersoll will take a look at some of the new and exciting ways users are leveraging Lucene/Solr and related technology to drive deeper insight into information needs that go beyond keywords in a text box.
Building Client-side Search Applications with Solrlucenerevolution
Presented by Daniel Beach, Search Application Developer, OpenSource Connections
Solr is a powerful search engine, but creating a custom user interface can be daunting. In this fast paced session I will present an overview of how to implement a client-side search application using Solr. Using open-source frameworks like SpyGlass (to be released in September) can be a powerful way to jumpstart your development by giving you out-of-the box results views with support for faceting, autocomplete, and detail views. During this talk I will also demonstrate how we have built and deployed lightweight applications that are able to be performant under large user loads, with minimal server resources.
Splunk Ninjas: New features, pivot, and search dojoSplunk
Besides seeing the newest features in Splunk Enterprise and learning the best practices for data models and pivot, we will show you how to use a handful of search commands that will solve most search needs. Learn these well and become a ninja.
Keep Your Code Low, Low, Low, Low, Low: Getting to Digitally Driven With Orac...Jim Czuprynski
In the brave new digitally-driven world, IT organizations can no longer focus on internal-only RDBMS databases as the central pillar of their infrastructure; data must be accessed externally as well, regardless of format or location, with utmost security. Fortunately, Oracle’s Converged Database strategy makes it simple to satisfy these demands. This presentation explores the myriad facets of a Converged Database strategy and what it means for your career’s future path, regardless of whether you’re an application developer or DBA.
How to migrate from any CMS (thru the front-door)ICF CIRCUIT
Chris Rockwell, University of Michigan
Based on lessons learned, a presentation of some nifty techniques for expediting and automating content migration leveraging Ruby, Cucumber, Selenium, Capybara, CURB, and the SlingPostServlet
Open Metadata and Apache Atlas
- presented at the Dataworks summit in Sydney, Australia on 20 September 2017 by Ferd Scheepers (ING) and Nigel Jones (IBM)
Before Google, before search, heck, even before SQL, search and retrieve meant one thing: the library. And you think you have a lot of noisy data in crusty formats to search? Even if you don't have 100 million books in your catalog, Solr applications for library data offer practical, general purpose solutions to some of the knottiest search problems.
Do you need an external search platform for Adobe Experience Manager?therealgaston
Experience Manager provides some basic search capabilities out of the box. In this talk, we'll explore an external search platform for implementing an Experience Manager powered, search-driven site. As an example, we will use Apache Solr as a reference implementation and describe best practices for indexing content, exposing non-Experience Manager content via search, delivering search-driven experiences, and deploying the solution in a production setting.
Webinar: Lucidworks + Thomson Reuters for Improved Investment PerformanceLucidworks
Learn how the Lucidworks Fusion and Thomson Reuters Intelligent Tagging joint solution can help financial services professionals make better, faster investment decisions.
In just a few short years, search has quickly evolved from being a small text box in the nether regions of a website to being front and center in our lives. Increasingly, however, search engine technology is also being used for practical, real time recommendations, events processing, complex spatial functionality and time series analysis capable of not only matching user's queries in text, but also driving real time decision making and analytics. In fact, open source Apache Lucene/Solr can do all of this and more by taking advantage of new data structures and algorithms that complement more traditional IR approaches. In this demo-driven talk, Lucene committer Grant Ingersoll will take a look at some of the new and exciting ways users are leveraging Lucene/Solr and related technology to drive deeper insight into information needs that go beyond keywords in a text box.
Building Client-side Search Applications with Solrlucenerevolution
Presented by Daniel Beach, Search Application Developer, OpenSource Connections
Solr is a powerful search engine, but creating a custom user interface can be daunting. In this fast paced session I will present an overview of how to implement a client-side search application using Solr. Using open-source frameworks like SpyGlass (to be released in September) can be a powerful way to jumpstart your development by giving you out-of-the box results views with support for faceting, autocomplete, and detail views. During this talk I will also demonstrate how we have built and deployed lightweight applications that are able to be performant under large user loads, with minimal server resources.
Splunk Ninjas: New features, pivot, and search dojoSplunk
Besides seeing the newest features in Splunk Enterprise and learning the best practices for data models and pivot, we will show you how to use a handful of search commands that will solve most search needs. Learn these well and become a ninja.
Keep Your Code Low, Low, Low, Low, Low: Getting to Digitally Driven With Orac...Jim Czuprynski
In the brave new digitally-driven world, IT organizations can no longer focus on internal-only RDBMS databases as the central pillar of their infrastructure; data must be accessed externally as well, regardless of format or location, with utmost security. Fortunately, Oracle’s Converged Database strategy makes it simple to satisfy these demands. This presentation explores the myriad facets of a Converged Database strategy and what it means for your career’s future path, regardless of whether you’re an application developer or DBA.
How to migrate from any CMS (thru the front-door)ICF CIRCUIT
Chris Rockwell, University of Michigan
Based on lessons learned, a presentation of some nifty techniques for expediting and automating content migration leveraging Ruby, Cucumber, Selenium, Capybara, CURB, and the SlingPostServlet
Open Metadata and Apache Atlas
- presented at the Dataworks summit in Sydney, Australia on 20 September 2017 by Ferd Scheepers (ING) and Nigel Jones (IBM)
Before Google, before search, heck, even before SQL, search and retrieve meant one thing: the library. And you think you have a lot of noisy data in crusty formats to search? Even if you don't have 100 million books in your catalog, Solr applications for library data offer practical, general purpose solutions to some of the knottiest search problems.
Technology opportunities in hampton roads (kaszubowski ), nasa technology day...Marty Kaszubowski
Presentation given at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) Technology Days (5/15/15). The topic of the discussion was how we can take better advantage of the assets in our region to promote high-growth ventures.
Apache Lucene is a high-performance, cross-platform, full-featured Information Retrieval library in open source, suitable for nearly every application that requires full-text search features.
Apache Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform; it uses
Lucene as its core search engine. Solr’s major features include powerful full-text search, hit
highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and complex queries.
Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the
search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.
Sol 1.4 is better than ever! Read this white paper and learn about these new features, including:
* enhanced data import capabilities
* rich document handling
* speedier numeric range queries
* duplicate detection
* java-based replication and deployment
* smarter handling of index changes
* faster faceting
* streamlined caching
What Lucene and Solr Open Source Search can do for Enterprise SearchLucidworks (Archived)
Companies like Netflix, Zappos and Monster have all utilized Lucene/Solr, an open-source search development environment ideally suited for large-scale, enterprise search applications. Download this free white paper and
* organize your enterprise search requirements from both technological and economic perspectives
* identify the technological and economic advantages of Lucene/Solr open source search
* learn about support available for designing, developing, and deploying the necessary search solution
http://www.lucidimagination.com/whitepaper/lucene-solr-enterprise-search
3RDi Platform for Enterprise Search, Discovery & AnalyticsThe Digital Group
T/DG’s 3RDi is semantic platform for effective Enterprise Search, Discovery and Analytics. The whitepaper addresses the challenges in the data–driven organizations. It summarizes how the context-enabled and semantic search can transform the traditional method to search optimum data. 3RDi has advanced capabilities in areas like Data Integration, Data Acquisition, Rapid Search, Discovery and Semantic Relevancy. Get the right data at the right time with this magnificent product.
Leading Your Firm To Success With SharePoint & Office 365 - ILTASPSRichard Harbridge
Richard Harbridge will share first-hand experience and advice on the practical application of Microsoft’s cloud technology. Learn what’s changed and why you should use O365 in the future, how best to integrate and leverage your existing investments in technologies and usage patterns, and how these technologies provide significant business value in legal departments and law firms today. What are successful organizations doing to maximize the effects of SharePoint and Office 365? Find out during this eye-opening keynote!
How Big Data can drive innovative technologies and new approaches in large or...Nick Brown
Presentation by Nick Brown at Big Data in Paris on 8th March 2016. Overview about how we have developed a big data engine around search and unstructured content (with Sinequa) and how this has lead to innovating with mobility, user experience and digital health initiatives. Also provides access to our PitchIT open innovation site.
Welcome to
How can I develop for Apache Solr in 2023?
The capacity to search is a core element of most modern systems. They must incorporate enormous amounts of data while yet allowing the end user to get what they're looking for quickly. DevOps must go beyond conventional databases with difficult and unintuitive (even if brilliant and imaginative) SQL query-based solutions in order to integrate search functions.
A free, open-source search engine built on the Apache Lucene architecture is Searching On Lucene with Replication (Apache Solr). One of the most widely used search engines nowadays, it has been available since 2004. It is a part of the Apache Lucene project. Contrarily, Solr is more than just a search engine; it's also frequently utilized as a key-value store and a document-based NoSQL database with transactional capabilities.
What is the development scope of Apache Solr?
Open-source search platform Solr can be used to make search applications. It was built on top of the full-text search engine Lucene. A quick, scalable, and enterprise-ready search engine is Solr. Applications built with Solr are intelligent and perform very well.In order to enhance the search functionality of CNET Networks' corporate website, Yonik Seely created Solr in 2004. In January 2006, it was accepted as an open-source undertaking by the Apache Software Foundation. The most recent version, Solr 6.0, includes capability for parallel SQL query execution and was released in 2016. Solr and Hadoop might collaborate. Since Hadoop manages a large number of data, Solr helps us find the crucial information from such a vast source.
What functions and duties do developers for Apache Solr perform?
Apache Solr developers collaborate with a group of talented engineers to design and build the next iteration of a company's mobile apps. Other technical and app development teams work closely with the developers to generate the product.
A developer's main responsibilities after securing remote Apache Solr developer employment are as follows:
Develop, keep up with, and enhance new search functionality for the program.
Open-source search APIs and SDKs should be created, improved, and maintained.
Develop and keep up strong query rewriting capabilities.
Make unit test cases for the Solr search engine that are automated.
Design, develop, assess, and test the Solr search engine in collaboration with cross-functional teams.
How to become an Apache Solr developer?
Let's examine the procedures for training to become an Apache Solr developer. To start, keep in mind that no academic degree is necessary to work as an Apache Solr developer. You can learn Apache Solr programming and use it as a vocation, whether you have a degree or not, are smart or inexperienced. All that is needed is real-world experience and a grasp of the necessary non-technical and technical skills.
However, you may have heard that roles for remote Apache Solr developers call for a bachelor's or master's degree in
Intranets in the Cloud: What You Need to Know at Unity Connect Online #UCO16 Kanwal Khipple
There is a growing trend of organizations moving to Office 365 to meet their Intranet and portal needs. While many organizations are running their SharePoint portals or Intranets on-premise, in a private cloud, or on public cloud offerings like Azure – many have already started or made the move to Office 365 powered Intranet experiences.
The question for many companies is “should our Intranet be built with Office 365?” and if so, “how should we best take advantage of Office 365 features with our Intranet?”
We’ll give you guidance and recommendations to successfully plan and implement an Office 365 Intranet as well as:
The benefits of Office 365 for Intranets
Why you should consider migrating your Intranet to Office 365
When and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing Intranet today
Lessons learned and challenges with Office 365 Intranets
There is a growing trend of organisations moving to ‘the cloud’ to meet their intranet. While many organisations are running their Intranets ‘on the premises’, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions such as Office 365. The question for many companies is: ‘should our intranet be built with Office 365?’.
In this session, Richard will explore:
The benefits Office 365 brings to an intranet
Where the issues and challenges will lie
When and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing intranet today.
Accelerate Innovation & Productivity With Rapid Prototyping & Development - ...Attivio
Today, development teams typically need hundreds of person hours to develop an application or to fully
integrate a new platform. Prototypes and Proofs of Concept (PoC) also take many weeks (or even months)
to develop. If you could significantly reduce these timeframes, you would accelerate time to market and
expedite PoCs and rollouts. This advantage saves money and reduces the risk of missing features, late deliveries or inadequate testing.
Presented by Mikael Wendelius (Findwise) & Jeff Fried (BA Insight) at Intranätverk 2016: Stockholm, 20 October.
Intranets and hybrid search – use search to bridge the “great divide” so your users find what they are looking for!
Jeff Fried and Mikael Wendelius show how hybrid search can drive a great intranet experience. They demonstrate this using SharePoint and Office 365, and illustrate the benefits and pitfalls with case studies.
1° Sessione Oracle CRUI: Analytics Data Lab, the power of Big Data Investiga...Jürgen Ambrosi
I dati sono il nuovo Capitale: come il capitale finanziario, sono una risorsa che deve essere gestita, raccolta e tenuta al sicuro, ma deve essere anche investita dalle organizzazioni che vogliono ottenere vantaggio competitivo. I dati non sono una risorsa nuova, ma soltanto oggi per la prima volta sono disponbili in abbondanza assieme alle tecnologie necessarie per massimizzarne il ritorno. Esattamente come l'elettricità fu una curiosità da laboratorio per molto tempo, finché non venne resa disponibile alle masse e dunque cambiò totalmente il volto dell'industria moderna.Ecco perché per accelerare il cambiamento è necessario un approccio innovativo alla esecuzione delle iniziative orientate ai Big Data: un laboratorio analitico come catalizzatore dell'innovazione (Data Lab).In questo webinar sulle tecnologie Oracle, utilizzeremo il consueto approccio del racconto basato su casi d’uso ed esperienze concrete.
Presented by Marc Krellenstein | Lucid Imagination http://www.lucidimagination.com/devzone/events/conferences/revolution/2011
While it remains challenging to build best practice search applications, core search technology has become commoditized. Open source Lucene/Solr represents the best form of that commodity. It is as good as or better than than any commercial search technology while also providing the cost, control and flexibility advantages of open source. In this talk, we'll look at how past challenges in search were met and new ones evolved, and the place of Lucene/Solr in that evolution.
UX-plosive stuff - user experience to come first (ADF Enterprise Mobility Con...Lucas Jellema
The user experience determines not just the satisfaction of a user with an application. It is also crucial in the productivity of users, the quality of their work and the reaction speed to events and trends. And because enterprise applications are increasingly used by external users such as customers and business partners, this experience (known as US) is important in terms of competition and marketing. For SaaS providers, the UX may be the single biggest factor on which they are selected or not.
This session discusses current industry trends in User Experience and Oracle’s view of things, as advocated by the Oracle Applications User Experience Team. The mobilization of the enterprise user community and the wide range of devices that are used for enterprise application interaction is an important aspect, as are approaches to provide users with the best experience given their role, device(s) and modes of working. The UX-team’s mantra Simplicity |Mobility|Extensibility is explained, as are the
Simplified UI based on the 90:90:10 notion and the Glance/Scan/Commit concept. Visualization as part of the User Experience makes an appearance. Finally, some of the resources available through the UX Direct program are highlighted.
Intranets in the Cloud: What you need to know #spsmontrealKanwal Khipple
In this session we will explore, the benefits Office 365 brings to an intranet, where the issues and challenges will lie and when and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing intranet and digital workplace today...
Searching the all-time growing amount of global data and research results and retrieving only the relevant and up-to date information becomes more and more challenging. The amount of data including the big data issue in the IoT world makes it even more challenging. How can an employee keeping himself up to date and include the relevant information into his work and ensure his work includes the most relevant and latest information. Most search engines today provide some sort of semantic based answers to the queries you enter into the system. However, most search engines do not know you well enough to provide you with the best answers based on who you are, and what you really want for an answer. Here is today's challenge combined with the growing amount of data and media you find it in. The answer might be closer than you think.
Similar to Moving to Solr/Lucene Open Source Search (20)
Couchbase Connect 2014: Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes takes you on a fantastic voyage through the hope and the hype of big data and why the future is search-centric.
LucidWorks SiLK is an open source stack that combines Lucene/Solr with best in class open source data ingestion and analytics tools such as Flume, LogStash and Kibana. This webinar will explore the features of SiLK, and provide attendees with valuable information on how they can benefit from the following:
- A powerful UI to analyze time series data stored in Lucene/Solr
- Creating and sharing visualizations, dashboards and reports
- Discovery and analysis of data coming from servers, applications, devices and more
- Exploration of click, geospatial and social data in ways previously unimaginable
LucidWorks App for Splunk Enterprise is the first of its kind, specifically designed to allow companies to analyze and manage the health and availability of their Solr deployments in Splunk software. The solution integrates multi-structured data indexed by Solr directly into Splunk® Enterprise, giving system administrators the ability to look at the intersection of documents, customer records or other unstructured data sources as they relate to machine data. This enables companies to optimize their Solr applications, glean insights from search and usage patterns and spot security concerns to improve end user experiences and derive more business value from data-driven applications.
This webinar will explore the features of the App, and provide attendees with valuable information on the following key components:
Solr Monitor: Monitor the health and availability and utilization of LucidWorks and/or Solr deployments with pre-defined data inputs, dashboards and reports
Search Analytics: Perform user behavior and click-stream analysis with pre-built search analytics reports and fields
NoSQL Lookups: Using Splunk’s lookup facility enrich your Splunk reports with data of any structure using Solr’s fully indexed and searchable NoSQL-datastore
Search Time Joins: Join Splunk data with human generated and other unstructured data sources stored in Solr at search time for developing data-driven applications
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
A tale of scale & speed: How the US Navy is enabling software delivery from l...sonjaschweigert1
Rapid and secure feature delivery is a goal across every application team and every branch of the DoD. The Navy’s DevSecOps platform, Party Barge, has achieved:
- Reduction in onboarding time from 5 weeks to 1 day
- Improved developer experience and productivity through actionable findings and reduction of false positives
- Maintenance of superior security standards and inherent policy enforcement with Authorization to Operate (ATO)
Development teams can ship efficiently and ensure applications are cyber ready for Navy Authorizing Officials (AOs). In this webinar, Sigma Defense and Anchore will give attendees a look behind the scenes and demo secure pipeline automation and security artifacts that speed up application ATO and time to production.
We will cover:
- How to remove silos in DevSecOps
- How to build efficient development pipeline roles and component templates
- How to deliver security artifacts that matter for ATO’s (SBOMs, vulnerability reports, and policy evidence)
- How to streamline operations with automated policy checks on container images
Alt. GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using ...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Essentials of Automations: The Art of Triggers and Actions in FMESafe Software
In this second installment of our Essentials of Automations webinar series, we’ll explore the landscape of triggers and actions, guiding you through the nuances of authoring and adapting workspaces for seamless automations. Gain an understanding of the full spectrum of triggers and actions available in FME, empowering you to enhance your workspaces for efficient automation.
We’ll kick things off by showcasing the most commonly used event-based triggers, introducing you to various automation workflows like manual triggers, schedules, directory watchers, and more. Plus, see how these elements play out in real scenarios.
Whether you’re tweaking your current setup or building from the ground up, this session will arm you with the tools and insights needed to transform your FME usage into a powerhouse of productivity. Join us to discover effective strategies that simplify complex processes, enhancing your productivity and transforming your data management practices with FME. Let’s turn complexity into clarity and make your workspaces work wonders!
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
Threats to mobile devices are more prevalent and increasing in scope and complexity. Users of mobile devices desire to take full advantage of the features
available on those devices, but many of the features provide convenience and capability but sacrifice security. This best practices guide outlines steps the users can take to better protect personal devices and information.
PHP Frameworks: I want to break free (IPC Berlin 2024)Ralf Eggert
In this presentation, we examine the challenges and limitations of relying too heavily on PHP frameworks in web development. We discuss the history of PHP and its frameworks to understand how this dependence has evolved. The focus will be on providing concrete tips and strategies to reduce reliance on these frameworks, based on real-world examples and practical considerations. The goal is to equip developers with the skills and knowledge to create more flexible and future-proof web applications. We'll explore the importance of maintaining autonomy in a rapidly changing tech landscape and how to make informed decisions in PHP development.
This talk is aimed at encouraging a more independent approach to using PHP frameworks, moving towards a more flexible and future-proof approach to PHP development.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 5DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 5. In this session, we will cover CI/CD with devops.
Topics covered:
CI/CD with in UiPath
End-to-end overview of CI/CD pipeline with Azure devops
Speaker:
Lyndsey Byblow, Test Suite Sales Engineer @ UiPath, Inc.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
2. Abstract
Search was once considered a black-box application that ingested content and delivered results to users
opaquely. However, driven by the opportunities and demands of the growing universe of content and by
the versatility of Solr/Lucene open source search technology, search applications are evolving from a
standalone facility to an enabling framework.
Good search is hard. While the basics of search technology can be deceptively simple, the art and science
of applying that technology to relevant business and content processing problems is daunting. By its very
nature, search can span an almost infinite variety of content, formats, subject matter, relevancy criteria,
and more.
This Open Source Search Readiness Checklist is organized into four broad categories:
Why do you need a search application?
What are the key technical characteristics of your search application?
What is your search application’s technology environment?
How can you ensure the best fit between Solr/Lucene and your ongoing business needs?
Each category details key issues to consider in moving to open source search. Whether you are
undertaking a new search application or have a working search application running on a platform you
are considering leaving behind, this checklist provides a working foundation to help you make the
transition smoothly.
Working with Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Solr/Lucene open source search
technology, offers you packaged solutions that simplify and streamline search application development;
lower the cost of growth through flexible, adaptable architecture; and deliver reliable backing of
unmatched expertise in enterprise search and open source.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page i
3. Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 1
I. Why Do You Need a Search Application?........................................................................................................................... 2
II. What Are the Key Technical Characteristics of Your Search Application? .......................................................... 5
III . What Is the Technology Environment in Which You Are Building Your Search Application? ...................... 9
IV. How can you ensure fit between Solr/Lucene and your ongoing business needs? ........................................ 13
Summary of Questions...................................................................................................................................................................... 16
About Lucid Imagination ................................................................................................................................................................. 17
Recommended Reading ................................................................................................................................................................... 17
Appendix: Solr/Lucene Features and Benefits ........................................................................................................................ 18
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page ii
4. Introduction
Whether you are undertaking a new search application or have a working search application running on
a platform you are considering leaving behind, there are a lot of questions you’ll need to answer to be
prepared for the effort.
Good search is hard. While the basics of search technology can be deceptively simple, the art and science
of applying that technology to relevant business and content processing problems are daunting. By its
very nature, search can span an almost infinite variety of content, formats, subject matter, relevancy
criteria, and more. Add in the fact that there are almost as many ways to judge relevant results as there
are individual end users, and you can see the challenge.
This Open Source Readiness Checklist is organized into four broad categories, each with a discussion of
the issues and opportunities you’ll need to consider as you prepare for your search application. Where
applicable, we’ll provide additional references for further study or research.
Why do you need a search application?
What are the key technical characteristics of your search application?
What is your search application’s technology environment?
How can you ensure the best fit between Solr/Lucene and your ongoing business needs?
This guide is not intended to replace a design strategy, architectural rigor, or a formal requirements
document. By considering answers for the issues it sets forth, we believe you’ll be better prepared for
getting your Solr/Lucene application up and running.
If you are replacing a legacy commercial platform, you may wonder: Can Solr/Lucene be a complete
search platform if you can’t just “drop it in” and replace what you now have, function-for-function,
feature for feature? Consider first that, owing to the great variation of search problems, search
technology providers have historically taken different approaches to developing their own toolkit: An
effort to imitate one with the other will not cut it. We believe you will be best served by a fresh look at the
problem search was meant to solve, unburdened by the details of prior implementations. More
importantly, the flexibility and adaptive nature of Solr/Lucene open source will both enable immediate
transition and lay the foundation for evolving your application to meet emerging needs.
The key measure of readiness for the transition is a solid grip on the value of the effort. Lucid
Imagination’s customers report that Solr/Lucene technology delivers tremendous benefits in flexibility,
result quality, performance—and most importantly, an ability to control their business and technology
destiny with search. Those same customers use Lucid Imagination’s services and solutions to lock in
those gains, and cement the competitive advantage achieved with Solr/Lucene.
We believe an understanding of these advantages will lead you to apply Solr/Lucene most effectively, and
identify where it is that Lucid Imagination can help you design, develop, and deploy your search
application with confidence.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 1
5. In understanding the motivation behind your search application, consider how best to align three factors:
I. Why Do You Need a Search Application?
your users, your data, and your business objectives.
When you build a search application, you face end users with expectations driven by their experience
with the large consumer search engines on the public Internet, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Certainly,
the billions of dollars spent on billions of end users searching trillions of documents have delivered
broad-ranging innovations.
It’s a fundamentally different proposition to build your own search application. Internet searches may
produce millions of results in milliseconds, but they rely on measures like website popularity or on URLs
and domain names—not generally applicable to purpose-built applications for businesses. Relying on
generalized relevancy for a global population of all Internet users, the big Internet search engines are not
tied to your business rules, business process logic, or the opportunity cost of improved precision for your
specific set of data or your search users—and their business interests are not yours.
Retrieval of unstructured, heterogeneous documents and data is where
Lucene/Solr search technology excels. Much of that data has been
stored in a relational database, which offer robust storage and stability,
RECOMMENDED READING:
but its query and retrieval model is ill-suited to the more varied,
dynamic modern data landscape.
Starting a Search
Application
Solr/Lucene search technology offers extraordinarily
Marc Krellenstein, CTO and
broad applicability, flexibility, scalability, and adaptability. Open source
Founder, Lucid Imagination
provenance contributes directly to those benefits in many ways. It
The Case for Lucene/Solr:
provides a broad community of professional developers, testing and
Real World Open Source
perfecting the technology against tremendous variation in use cases, as
Search Applications
well as changes and improvements that are strictly peer-reviewed,
A Lucid Imagination White
creating a broad foundation of innovation and rigorous peer review.
Paper
Not to mention faceting, geo-search, numeric range queries, speed and
scalability into the billions of documents, near-real-time indexing,
and many more innovations that have broken barriers to building effective search applications.
Another great capability inherent in the Solr/Lucene platform is anticipating the future needs of the
broad range of users. With adaptive and editorial boosting relevancy techniques, query corrections and
suggestions, recommended results, and faceted search, search applications built with Solr/Lucene help
your business control the quality of experience between your users and your data—and fit that
experience to your business objectives.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 2
6. Free software, such as Lucene and Solr open source search, does not mean search is free of effort. If
1. What business objectives are (or should be) achieved with your search application?
your search project is successful, consider how you will prove it: Which of these would you be able to
point to?
(a) Save money? How much or how much more?
(b) Save time? How much or how much more?
(c) Increase revenue? How much or how much more?
(d) Increase end user satisfaction? Which ones?
(e) Create advantage over competitors?
(f) Decrease risk? How much or how much more?
(g) More than one of the above?
Most organizations have a system for finding information, often a legacy commercial search system.
2. What objectives are (or are not) being met with your current search implementation?
Why is it unsatisfactory? If you were to replace or improve it, which of the results in the previous
question would it affect? By how much?
Which of the following properties of your search application (one or more) would have the most
3. Which improvements in search behavior contribute to improved business results?
impact on the business results you are looking for?
(a) Speed with which new content is available.
(b) Likelihood the user’s chosen result is in the top n results returned.
(c) Completeness of the full set of results the system delivers.
(d) Speed with which queries deliver result sets.
(e) Flexibility with which the system handles different types of queries.
(f) Ability of the system to never deliver “zero” results.
(g) Ranking of particular results for particular queries.
(h) Reduced effort required for users to find previously unknown content.
(i) Likelihood the user will return to use the search system again and again.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 3
7. Within the realm of search behaviors, special attention needs to be paid to the control of search
4. How much control do you need over the results that end users see?
results. Often, the application of algorithms, business rules, and access rights tie directly to the
economic benefits of search. Solr/Lucene offer great depth in this dimension. The previous question
asked about general changes in search behavior; here, consider specifically how important direct
control of results is to the success of the application.
(a) Do you need to adjust the likelihood that particular results or documents appear at a certain
time, or in relationship to other results?
(b) Are there certain documents or data that should be delivered to certain users, but proscribed
from others?
(c) Are there algorithms that you need the system to account for programmatically, in automated
fashion during the course of search, such as performing probability calculations?
(d) How important is it that you understand why the search returned a particular set of results,
and be able to adjust the search behavior as a result?
The behavior of your search application will be judged by its end users; how much do you know
5. How much do your end users know about the content they are searching for?
about those users and the queries they are likely to submit? Consider the following contrasts. Are
your end users likely to:
(a) Express their queries in terms or phrases that will narrow in on results quickly, or submit
broad, general words that retrieve broad results?
(b) Spell the terms they are searching for correctly?
(c) Search for known results in an unknown location (e.g., “Find the e-mail I sent to Carol on
Tuesday, August 10” )? Or undertake a search without knowing which content they might
find?
(d) Browse through interim sets of results in order to narrow or refine their search queries?
(e) Specify quantitative parameters, such as distances, prices, locations, or dates, as part of their
search?
(f) Use logic-oriented language (e.g., Boolean queries or wildcard characters) or natural
language?
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 4
8. II. What Are the Key Technical
Characteristics of Your Search Application?
Given the flexibility and broad applicability of Solr/Lucene open source search technology, there is a rich
set of design decisions to be made in setting up the application to meet your business objectives within
the scope of your technology. In this section, we’ll explore some of the key inputs you’ll need to consider
before you begin the exercise of architecture and design of your search application. In most, if not all, of
the permutations of search needs implied by the questions below, the flexibility of Solr/Lucene search
can address your needs.
It’s important to note that these questions are not intended to replace a formal design process or
substitute for rigorous architectural assessment of how you can use Solr/Lucene to build a successful
search application. Rather, it will help establish your intent with respect to key functional and system
behaviors.
More than in the previous sections, you may find that the answers to
the scoping questions below change over time. As you familiarize
RECOMMENDED READING:
yourself with the capabilities and possibilities available with the
Solr/Lucene search platform, you may well want to refine or revise
Faceted Search with Solr
your understanding of what constitutes desired behavior.
Yonik Seeley, creator of
Apache Solr and co-founder
Often, organizations build a working prototype of their search
of Lucid Imagination
application in order to validate the assumptions, as well as the design
Optimizing Findability in
and implementation of the system intended to put those assumptions
Lucene and Solr
into action. While there are many nuances to formal development
Grant Ingersoll, Chair,
methodologies that exploit this discover-by-doing effect, they share a
Apache Lucene PMC and co-
founder of Lucid
common pattern of implementation, iteration, learning, improvement,
Imagination
and change.
It is strongly recommended that you consider at least two sets of answers to the questions below; first for
a prototype implementation, and perhaps one or more revisions of that implementation going forward,
once you accumulate experience and discover the full range of possibilities.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 5
9. Much as documents and data can live in different repositories, they come packaged in different
1. In hat formats are the documents and data you will search?
formats, based on where they originated and who created them. A good understanding of these
formats enables successful content processing for search. Different format types require different
levels of interpretation and composition to separate out searchable text content and metadata
(information about the document or its content), which can inform a search, from visual presentation
details such as colors, fonts, or software-specific content. For each of the formats, there are further
considerations of version; to cite just one example, the formatting and file structure of Microsoft
Word 97 *.doc documents differs from the Office 2007 *.docx version.
Solr/Lucene can leverage a range of tools—built-in as well as extensions, including both open source
and commercial source. Which of the following document format types will you be indexing and
searching?
(a) XML documents
(b) Database records
(c) HTML documents
(d) Microsoft office documents: *.doc or *.docx for Word; *.ppt or *.pptx for Powerpoint; *.xls or
*.xlsx for Excel
(e) PDF documents
(f) CSV (comma separated values) or TSVs (tab separated values)
(g) Open Office documents
(h) Engineering drawings from CAD/CAM/CAE systems
(i) Others
Configuring your search system requires an understanding of your document sizes, as performance
2. Document collection composition: how big are documents?
and throughput depend heavily on accounting for the size of documents to be indexed. What
percentage or fraction of your documents are:
(a) Under 1 KB (f) 5 MB to 10 MB
(b) 1 KB to 100 KB (g) 10 MB to 50 MB
(c) 100 KB to 500 KB (h) 50 MB to 100 MB
(d) 500 KB to 1 MB (i) 100 KB to 250 MB
(e) 1 MB to 5 MB (j) 250 MB and up
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 6
10. 3. Howmuch new content do you presently add per unit time?
The quality of your search results can be affected by the interval between when a document is
How many documents are updated per unit time?
complete or ready, and when it appears in the index for searching.
(a) Millions of very small documents—in the form of tweets, comments, messages, log files, etc.—
appear continuously as users or systems create these content snippets.
(b) Existing documents are revised, either by users, or by machines—in the latter case, examples
such as reports and data output indexed by your search application.
(c) New documents are available less frequently, perhaps even on a regular schedule, which in
turn drives user expectations of when they can be searched.
(d) Changes to content come in particular windows, busier at some times than others.
Consider the question of change to your collection in two ways: First, at what interval does the
amount of content in your collection change? Second, what fraction of the total documents are you
adding to the overall collection within each interval?
(a) From minute to minute (e) Daily
(b) About to four times per hour (f) Weekly
(c) No more than two per hour (g) Monthly
(d) No more once every 4 hours
Consider the population of users who drive your search application. How many are they, and what
4. What is the rate of queries you expect from your user population?
number of queries might be submitted? Consider especially that queries in the search application do
not always map one-to-one with a single string entered by a user in a search box. Use these questions
to characterize how many queries your search application will need to handle per unit time, typically
in queries per second.
(a) How often do they need access to the application?
(b) Will they submit queries one at a time on an occasional or ad-hoc basis, or will they rely on
the search application for continuous constant use?
(c) Do they have the expertise necessary to narrow quickly on search results, or will they require
continuous iteration, using one set of results to inform a series of subsequent queries?
(d) Will they have the expertise to write queries that conform precisely to the search
application’s expectation, or will you rely on the search application to analyze and decompose
their terms and phrases to ensure efficient execution and relevant results?
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 7
11. 5. Does your content require faceting or a taxonomy in order to support productive navigation
Faceted search provides an effective way to allow users to refine search results, continually drilling
and discovery by end-users?
down until the desired items are found. For example, on an e-commerce site, Solr/Lucene can present
a list of different brands of a flat-screen television, or let the user navigate into results. Facets can
span virtually any list of attributes, from sets of terms within a field to dates to numeric ranges and
the like. In addition to document-driven faceting, some search applications add an external taxonomy
platform to derive metadata—i.e., to extract what documents are about and append fields that
support guided navigation through results.
(a) Do documents contain data or metadata that allow users to narrow results?
(b) Are there consistent rules of document analysis you can create and apply to derive attributes
from documents?
(c) If documents lack native metadata, can you use a third party taxonomy platform to identify
attributes for faceted navigation?
6. Which advanced search features do you expect to use in order to improve how users can
Solr/Lucene offers a broad set of powerful query and search tools that can help users quickly choose
submit queries and choose?
from available options, either before or after they submit a query. Which of the following features can
help improve the speed and efficacy of the experience for your end users?
(a) Autosuggest/as-you-type: The search application prompts the user with possible alternate
queries implied by a partial or complete search term, as they type in the search box.
(b) Spellchecking: The search application can interpret search terms that are not necessarily
spelled correctly, either prompting the user with correctly spelled alternatives, and/or
automatically retrieving results that match terms that most closely resemble the misspelled
word in the query.
(c) Did you mean: Similar to spell checking, the search application can offer alternate matches to
terms that resemble the user’s query, even when those terms were not typed in explicitly.
(d) More like this: The search application allows the user to drill down into a particular element
of one result set to find additional results that resemble it.
(e) Hit highlighting: The search application can mark or emphasize specific terms from the
query in snippets of the document result, showing the user which terms match the query.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 8
12. III . What Is the Technology Environment
in Which You Are Building Your Search Application?
Driven by the opportunities and demands of the growing universe of available content and by the
versatility of Solr/Lucene open source search, search is evolving from a standalone facility to an enabling
framework.
Search was once considered a black-box application that ingested
content and delivered results to users opaquely. No more. Today,
RECOMMENDED READING:
developers are turning to Solr/Lucene to extend the data access and
management power of their applications into the realm of unstructured
Full Text Search
text—documents, articles, product descriptions, case studies, informal
Engine vs. RDBMS
Marc Krellenstein, CTO and
notes, websites, forums, wikis, inventory data, patient records, e-mail
co-founder, Lucid
messages, resumes, patents, legal decisions, tweets, log files, traditional
Imagination
relational data stores, and nontraditional data infrastructure: The
Scaling Lucene and Solr
examples are endless. Effective retrieval of timely, actionable content in
Mark Miller, Lucid
the face of such diversity means treating search as an application
Imagination; Apache
development platform or an enabling framework, not an end-unto-itself
Lucene and Solr Committer
application.
Like application development effort, the exercise of creating search applications and enabling existing
applications with search must be driven by business considerations. With an understanding of your
business needs in hand from the previous section, we now turn to the constraints and capabilities of the
technology context in which the search application is to be developed and deployed, and exploring key
attributes of your technology environment tied to search application development.
Solr and Lucene search applications are typically developed as web applications. High-level search
1. What Programming Skills Do Your Developers Bring to Your Search Application?
functions that can be accessed programmatically include queries, indexing commands, relevance
algorithms, performance, and the like, generally presented by Solr as services and configuration
options. Solr offers a particularly broad base of client libraries, which means it can be accessed
through a large variety of programming languages.
In which of the following languages/environments supported by Solr is your application development
team skilled and experienced?
(a) JSON (f) Python
(b) Java (g) .Net
(c) Ruby (h) C#
(d) PHP (i) Perl
(e) Ajax (j) JavaScript
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 9
13. For most intents and purposes, open-source software has “crossed the chasm” into mainstream
2. Is your development team skilled and experienced in working with Open Source?
usage, with a broad range of government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors running well-established
portions of their IT infrastructure on the LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
A recent survey of 300 large corporations by the global consultancy firm Accenture shows the
majority of respondents committing strategic technology initiatives to open source. To gauge the
depth of open source utilization, which of the following major open source projects are broadly
utilized in your organization?
(a) Linux for server operating systems
(b) MySQL or Postgres for RDBMS
(c) Eclipse for integrated software development
(d) PHP for web application integration
(e) Apache for http services
(f) Tomcat for web application containers
(g) JBOSS for application business logic
Most individuals are acquainted with searching for content stored either in the context of their own
3. How and where are the data and documents stored, independent of format?
personal computer environments, such as a file system, in e-mail, or in one of the popular,
advertising-driven consumer-facing commercial Internet search service. In the context of enterprise
or commercial search, the diversity of data storage methods spans a much broader range of
technologies, not necessarily tied to formats for individual file objects. Which of the following data
repositories will your search application access?
(a) Traditional directory-oriented file servers, fileshares, and filesystems
(b) Web servers
(c) Relational databases, including Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Informix, Postgres, DB2
(d) Nonrelational (AKA NoSQL) data stores, such as Hadoop, Cassandra, Memcached
(e) Proprietary collaboration stores e.g., Lotus Notes, Sharepoint
(f) Open Source content management systems, e.g., Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco.
(g) Proprietary Enterprise content management systems, e.g., Documentum, Vignette, OpenText
(h) XML-oriented data stores, such as Mark Logic
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 10
14. IT organizations are able to achieve significant setup/deployment economies by standardizing
4. On what operating system platform(s) or environments will your search application run?
hardware and software practices at the platform level, along with operating practices. Because Solr
runs in a Java servlet container, with indexes portable across platforms, it can operate in any of the
mix of mainstream operating system environments, virtualized environments and cloud platforms
available in today’s marketplace.
(a) Linux
(b) Solaris
(c) Windows/NT Server/.Net framework
(d) Mac OS
(e) Amazon EC2 (including the above OS environments)
(f) VMWare (including the above OS environments)
Solr and Lucene are complementary technologies that offer very similar underlying capabilities. Solr
5. Should you use Lucene or Solr?
is the Lucene search server; Lucene is the set of Java libraries that run inside the Solr search server,
also available independent of the server implementation.
As the Lucene search server, Solr presents a web service layer built atop Lucene using the Lucene
search library and extending it to provide application users with a ready-to-use search platform. Solr
offers search speed, relevancy ranking, complete query capabilities, portability, scalability, low
overhead indexes, and rapid incremental indexing, from its Lucene core. Its server encapsulation of
Lucene adds operational and administrative capabilities like web services, faceting, configurable
schema, caching, replication, and administrative tools for configuration, data loading, statistics,
logging, cache management, and more.
Lucene gives Solr its search power. In all but a small number of exceptions, organizations building
search applications should start with Solr rather than a direct implementation of the Lucene libraries.
Applications that do otherwise often began their efforts prior to the availability of Solr.
Solr provides the starting point for most developers who are building a Lucene-based search
application. Organizations who build with Solr find themselves better able to adapt their application
to changing data structures, query needs, user behaviors, and infrastructure configuration. These
benefits accrue in lower “costs of ownership,” improved flexibility, and a broader available pool of
search application developers in the marketplace.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 11
15. 6. Are application development practices in your organization structured to address time to
Successful application development depends on the professional practice of software development.
market constraints or technical complexity?
While there are many theories, approaches, and development models, there are a key set of
development disciplines practiced by successful application development organizations. Does your
application development team understand the tools and methodologies methods and mechanisms
involved in the following software development competencies?
(a) Requirements analysis
(b) Iterative design
(c) Documentation
(d) Test planning
(e) Change control
(f) Architectural description
(g) Formal design
(h) Fuild and release engineering
7. What service level availability does your search application need to deliver to end users? What
Solr’s ability to run on a distributed infrastructure provides robust application availability and
is the cost or impact of outages or service unavailability?
performance at scale, allowing you to expand to meet growth in both your document collection and
your user workload. As with all infrastructure, it is important to understand in advance what impact a
service outage would have on your end users, in order to ensure that the system is as strong as its
weakest link, so that you can make appropriate choices about networking, servers, storage, and
operating procedures. What is the longest interval during which your end users can be productive
without access to your search application? And how often can they tolerate such unscheduled
outages?
(a) 1 minute (a) Once per year
Duration Frequency
(b) 30 minutes (b) Once per month
(c) 1 hour (c) Once per week
(d) 4 hours (d) Once per day
(e) 1 day (e) Once an hour or more
(f) Longer than 1 day
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 12
16. IV. How can you ensure fit between Solr/Lucene
and your ongoing business needs?
The best test of technology in the enterprise is in its ability to deliver on business needs consistently. It
must strike the optimal balance between features/functions and the continuous achievement of
competitive advantage for the business paying for it. Search is the same, only more so: It must constantly
do a better and better job of delivering results that derive competitive advantage from matching end
users to valuable information in timely fashion.
Open source can be a two-edged sword: Unmatched in its innovation, the timing of its innovation (as is
often the case with innovation in any domain) is not always predictable. While the marketplace
challenges a company faces are constant and dynamic, its technology infrastructure demands a strong
degree of stability and predictability. The design, building, and maintenance of applications must handle
change without adding instability to the problems they aim to solve.
At Lucid Imagination, we specialize in capturing the best that open source Solr/Lucene search offers,
delivering it into business-critical application development efforts in a way that improves stability;
providing predictability without sacrificing the power, scalability, or flexibility of open source. With time-
driven support, deep expertise, and broad solution platform of stable value-added software, we
transform open source search into a stable foundation that lets you accelerate with confidence.
In this section, we’ll present considerations for you in taking advantage of the power of open source in
the context of the enterprise. Unlike previous sections that were shaped by various options, these
questions are designed to help you consider risks and dynamics of your development effort and its ability
to bridge the gap: between the open source innovation you need to compete and the enterprise
foundation you rely on to effectively reap the benefits of that innovation.
If there is one element all search applications share, it is their diversity: Each set of content, queries,
1. What is your “bench-depth” in designing and deploying search applications?
and end user requirements is unique. One of the great strengths of open source search is as a robust,
general purpose platform capturing inputs from a broad variety of search use cases.
Even when you have top talent, your search application may be limited by their experience; others
inside or outside the public open source discussion archives might have experience that could benefit
their efforts.
For example, the foundations of ambition for your search application are built-in early: Your
development team must make critical architecture and design decisions, with significant downstream
impact throughout subsequent releases of your application to customers. Breadth of experience will
make a critical difference in whether those assumptions will lend themselves to necessary future
changes, or introduce unnecessary constraints that hobble your application when the time comes to
seize new opportunities.
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 13
17. 2. How does your organization find and incorporate changes to code or source code
Open source code is the raw material of your application development effort. The less it costs to
fixes for your applications?
ensure inbound quality and stability, the more you reduce risks to the application you are building.
Open source software does not stand still. Even between major releases, the team of committers and
programmers developing fixes and improvements is constantly adding new ideas and features to
their project. Some of these changes are available as patches, others are built into trunk and available
through nightly builds, and they may or may not meet your acceptance criteria.
Solr/Lucene is no different: Driven by a consensus-leveraged meritocracy, they produce changes that
may or may not be compatible with your implementation. Identifying which of those to incorporate
into development and assessing their impact on other elements of the system is a critical success
factor—and may or may not be obvious at the point in time they become available.
In building prototypes, you may or may not be able to wait for the community of experts to work on
3. What is the cost-benefit tradeoff of timely fixes and availability of expertise?
your need or provide advice; once you reach a production, business-critical scenario, you’ll need
things done on your timetable, not theirs. Or, you may not wish your particular effort to have any
public exposure at all—in which case you’ll want a communications channel that meets the needs of
your business in your marketplace.
Many problems can be solved given enough time and effort. If your design and deployment efforts
conform to a schedule where speed has value, consider the relative cost-benefits of internal trial-and-
error vs. predictably delivered expertise available on demand.
4. Does the cost-benefit tradeoff of fix timeliness change once your application moves into a
Once an application’s user base extends beyond the developers who built it, its owners must be ready
production environment?
to deliver consistent, predictable availability, performance, and scalability. Meeting the service needs
of end users cannot always be done in real time by the person who wrote the software; developers
move on to other projects or leave the company.
The heterogeneity of your content collection, particularly as it changes and grows, can introduce new,
unanticipated sources of anomalies in its performance. Similarly, it is difficult to anticipate the full
range of user queries and demands on the system, which often leads to the application's inability to
meet new, previously unaccounted-for requirements. Ensuring timeliness of fixes to accommodate
these organic changes may well be beyond the reach of your development team or your IT
organization.
Last, and not least, ensuring that the release process itself can meet its intended thresholds of
performance, throughput, and other systemic qualities can benefit from lessons learned by experts
experienced across a diverse range of deployments.
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18. 5. How Will You Ensure a Consistent, Authoritative Base of
Critical mass of expertise in development is directly correlated with the overall effectiveness and
Knowledge and Skills for Your Development Team to Work From?
velocity of your development efforts. The Solr/Lucene open source community provides developers
with a rich, diverse base of resources to use in bootstrapping their skills, including mailing list
forums, examples, peer-to-peer resources, and much more. The enterprise developer can swim far
and wide in the sea of information, learning by wandering among other implementations and other
discussions.
At the same time, organizations driven by a development and business timetable need a more
structured, organized, and directed approach to building a solid, consistent foundation based on
authoritative sources. Working from a pedagogically oriented set of materials, developers can not
only acquire a clearer sense of what the technology is and does, but also how best to apply search
engine technologies to business requirements. Best practices distilled from years of experience of a
broad base of experts can give your team a quicker start, reduce the setup and execution time, and
improve how effectively they contend with problems as and when they emerge.
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19. Summary of Questions
1. What business objectives are (or should be) achieved with your search application?
I. Why do you need a search application?
2. What objectives are (or are not) being met with your current search implementation?
3. Which improvements in search behavior contribute to improved business results?
4. How much control do you need over the results that end users see?
5. How much do your end users know about the content they are searching for?
1. In what formats are the documents and data you will search?
II. What are the key technical characteristics of your search application?
2. Document composition: how big are documents?
3. How much new content do you presently add per unit time?
How many documents are updated per unit time?
4. What is the rate of queries you expect from your user population?
5. Does your content require faceting or a taxonomy in order
to support productive navigation and discovery by end-users?
6. Which advanced search features do you expect to use
in order to improve how users can submit queries and choose?
1. What programming skills do your developers bring to your search application?
III . What is the technology environment in which you are building your search application?
2. Is your development team skilled and experienced in working with Open Source?
3. How and where are the data and documents stored, independent of format?
4. On what operating system platform(s) or operating environments will your search application run?
5. Should you use Lucene or Solr?
6. Are application development practices in your organization
structured to address time-to-market constraints or technical complexity?
7. What service level availability does your search application need
to deliver to end users? What is the cost or impact of outages or service unavailability?
1. What is your “bench-depth” in designing and deploying search applications?
IV. How can you ensure continuous fit between Solr/Lucene and your business needs?
2. How does your organization find and incorporate changes to code or source code fixes for your applications?
3. What is the cost-benefit tradeoff of timely fixes and availability of expertise?
4. Does the cost-benefit tradeoff of fix timeliness change once your application moves into a production
environment?
5. How will you ensure a consistent, authoritative base of
knowledge and skills for your development team to work from?
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20. About Lucid Imagination
Lucid Imagination can help you use Solr/Lucene to get the most from your search applications. Lucid
Imagination has the world-class expertise, resources, support, and services needed to cost-effectively
architect, implement, and optimize Solr/Lucene-based solutions. We provide commercial-grade support,
training, and consulting and offer certified, tested versions of Lucene and Solr. Lucid Imagination’s goal is
to serve as a central resource for the entire Lucene community and marketplace, to make enterprise
search application developers more productive. We also provide access to Solr/Lucene experts, well-
organized information, and documentation.
We’ve helped hundreds of companies get the most out of their search infrastructure. Customers include
AT&T, Buy.com, Cisco, Ford, Macy’s, Sears, Shopzilla, The Motley Fool, Verizon, Edmunds.com, GSI
Commerce, Zappos (Amazon), and many other household names. Lucid Imagination is a privately held
venture-funded company. The investors include Granite Ventures, Walden International, In-Q-Tel, and
Shasta Ventures. To learn more please visit http://www.lucidimagination.com or
http://www.lucidimagination.com/solutions.
For more information on what Lucid Imagination can do to help your employees, customers, and partners
get the most out of your e-commerce efforts contact sales@lucidimagination.com or please call
+1.650.353.4057.
Recommended Reading
Starting a Search Application by Marc Krellenstein
http://www.lucidimagination.com/developers/whitepapers/starting-search-application
The Case for Lucene/Solr Real World Open Source Search Applications
http:/www.lucidimagination.com/solutions/whitepapers/Managers-Guide-to-Real-World-Open-
Faceted Search with Solr by Yonik Seeley http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-
Source-Search-Applications
Optimizing Findability in Lucene and Solr by Grant Ingersoll
from-the-Experts/Articles/Faceted-Search-Solr
http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-from-the-Experts/Articles/Optimizing-
Full Text Search Engine vs. RDBMS by Marc Krellenstein
Findability-Lucene-and-Solr
http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-from-the-Experts/Articles/Faceted-Search-
Scaling Lucene and Solr by Mark Miller http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-
Solr
from-the-Experts/Articles/Scaling-Lucene-and-Solr
Lucene/Solr Open Source Search Readiness Checklist
A Lucid Imagination White Paper • September 2010 Page 17
21. Appendix: Solr/Lucene Features and Benefits
Lucene and Solr are complementary technologies that offer very similar underlying capabilities. In
choosing a search solution that is best suited for your requirements, key factors to consider are
application scope, development environment, and software development preferences.
Lucene is a Java technology-based search library that offers speed, relevancy ranking, complete query
capabilities, portability, scalability, and low overhead indexes and rapid incremental indexing.
Solr is the Lucene search server. It presents a web service layer built atop Lucene using the Lucene search
library and extending it to provide application users with a ready-to-use search platform. Solr brings with
it operational and administrative capabilities like web services, faceting, configurable schema, caching,
replication, and administrative tools for configuration, data loading, statistics, logging, cache
management, and more.
Lucene presents a collection of directly callable Java libraries and requires coding and solid information
retrieval experience. Solr extends the capabilities of Lucene to provide an enterprise-ready search
platform, eliminating the need for extensive programming.
Solr provides the starting point for most developers who are building a Lucene-based search application.
It comes ready to run in a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty, making it ready to scale in a
production Java environment.
With convenient ReST-like/web-service interfaces callable over HTTP, and transparent XML-based
configuration files, Solr can greatly accelerate application development and maintenance. In fact, Lucene
programmers have often reported that they find Solr contains “the same features I was going to build
myself as a framework for Lucene, but already very well implemented.” Using Solr, enterprises can
customize the search application according to their requirements, without involving the cost and risk of
writing the code from the scratch.
Lucene provides greater control of your source code and works best in development environments
where resources need to be controlled exclusively by Java API calls. It works best when constructing and
embedding a state-of-the-art search engine, allowing programmers to assemble and compile inside a
native Java application. While working with Lucene, programmers can directly control the large set of
sophisticated features with low-level access, data, or state manipulation.
Enterprises that do not require strict control of low-level Java libraries generally prefer Solr, as it
provides ease of use and scalable search power out of the box.
As functional siblings, Lucene and Solr have become popular alternatives for search applications; the two
differ mainly in the style of application development used. Key benefits of search with Solr/Lucene
include:
Search Quality: Speed, Relevance, and Precision Solr/Lucene provides near-real-time search and
strong relevance ranking to deliver contextually relevant and accurate results very quickly. Tailor-
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22. made coding for relevancy ranking and sophisticated search capabilities like faceted search help
users in sorting, organizing, classifying, and structuring retrieved information to ensure that search
delivers desired results. Search with Solr/Lucene also provides proximity operators, wildcards,
fielded searching, term/field/document weights, find-similar functions, spell checking, multilingual
search, and much more.
Lower Cost and Greater Flexibility, Plug and Play Architecture Solr/Lucene reduces recurring
and nonrecurring costs, lowering your TCO. As open source software, it does not require purchase of
a license and is freely available for use. The open source code can be used as is, modified, customized,
and updated as appropriate to your needs. Solr is easily embedded in your enterprise’s existing
infrastructure, reducing costs of installation, configuration, and management.
Open Source Platform for Portability and Easy Deployment Because Solr/Lucene is an open-
source software solution, it is based on open standards and community-driven development
processes. It is highly portable and can run on any platform that supports Java. For instance, you can
build an index on Linux and copy it to a Microsoft Windows machine and search there. This
unsurpassed portability enables you to keep your search application and your company’s evolving
infrastructure in tandem. Lucene, in turn, has been implemented in other environments, including C#,
C, Python, and PHP. At deployment time, Solr offers very flexible options; it can be easily deployed on
a single server as well as on distributed, multiserver systems.
Largest Installed Base of Applications, Increasing Customer Base Solr/Lucene is the most widely
used open source search system and is installed in around 4,000 organizations worldwide. Publicly
visible search sites that use Solr/Lucene include CNET, LinkedIn, Monster, Digg, Zappos, MySpace,
Netflix, and Wikipedia. Solr/Lucene is also in use at Apple, HP, IBM, Iron Mountain, and Los Alamos
National Laboratories.
Large Developer Base and Adaptability As community developed software, Solr/Lucene provides
transparent development and easy access to updates and releases. Developers can work with open
source code and customize the software according to business-specific needs and objectives. Its open
source paradigm lets Solr/Lucene provide developers with the freedom and flexibility to evolve the
software with changing requirements, liberating them from the constraints of commercial vendors.
Lucid Imagination provides the expertise, resources, and services needed to help enterprises deploy
Commercial-Grade Support for Mission Critical Search Applications from Lucid Imagination
and develop Lucene-based search solutions efficiently and cost-effectively. Lucid helps enterprises
achieve optimal search performance and accuracy with its broad range of expertise, which includes
indexing and metadata management, content analysis, business rule application, and natural
language processing. Lucid Imagination also offers certified distributions of Lucene and Solr,
commercial-grade SLA-based support, training, high-level consulting, and value-added software
extensions to enable customers to create powerful and successful search applications.
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