Today, Microsoft announced that it was abandoning development of the FAST search engine for Linux and Unix.  Given that Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for FAST, the move is an apparent revelation of a strategy to get non-Windows based users to move to an enterprise Windows platform rather than to continue to support FAST.

This move seems to be risky.  The Microsoft bet is that its FAST customers are more loyal to FAST than they are the operating platform, and the perception of switching costs are higher for moving from FAST to another enterprise search engine rather than the opposite–a loyalty to the operating system and a perception that search engines are interchangeable.

Microsoft might be right for most of its customers, but this announcement will certainly be grist for the mill in IT departments over the coming weeks.  Many companies built their IT infrastructure around a Linux-based platform, and being forced to change to a Windows environment may be a pill that is too hard to swallow.  The alternative will be to look to other search engines, which can do nothing but help Solr and Lucene.  With an established user base, enterprise grade support packages from companies like Lucid Imagination, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership than the FAST + Windows package, Solr will appeal to many a CTO who might otherwise have continued to gladly pay the licensing costs for FAST but is now forced to reconsider his or her decision.

Rather than supporting FAST on both platforms at the cost of a few developers, Microsoft may lose many more customers and revenues because of its insistence on one platform.  It will be interesting to see how companies like Lucid respond to the new opportunity.

From the Meetup site:

We’ll look at the thriving Ruby ecosystem that has grown up around integrating with Solr. From Ruby gems that integrate with Solr like solrb and rsolr, to general search solutions like acts_as_solr and sunspot. We’ll also look at a complete “shrink wrapped” catalog solution for Solr using BlacklightOPAC.

You’ll lean the basics of getting started with Solr, and an understanding of what Ruby solutions are available to simplifying adding great search to your site!

As usual, food and beverages will be provided.

I’m very pleased to be speaking to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) next Wednesday October 14th, at 6:00 pm at Anthem BCBS in Richmond.  The address is 2015 Staples Mill Road in Richmond.  You can find more details and register online at:

http://www.richmondspin.org/home22222

Here’s the brief on my talk, which is based on my recent talk at Agile 2009.  I hope to see you there!

“Strategies for Persuasion on Adopting Agile”
By Arin Sime, Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections

Do you want to know why Agile is sometimes a preferred methodology over a Waterfall method?  Arin will present 12 different methods for convincing a “traditional client” to use an Agile project plan. Based upon his own experiences with a wide variety of project styles, he will also present several definitions of each of the environments, well as results gathered from a survey on how to sell Agile. Some stories and best practices from other sources will also be covered.

When: August 25, 2009 from 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Where: Michie North Building Room 324 across from Barracks shopping center.

RJ Bruneel will show his Stock Watch Flex app which uses Google Finance for customers to be able to watch their stock portfolios.

For more information about the meeting: http://groups.adobe.com/posts/93f0df3964

For more information about the CVille Adobe User Group: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/2aec1514da

OSC is proud to announce that we will attend and sponsor this year’s EdUI Conference 2009 which is bein held at the University of Virginia on 21st-22nd September 2009. A number of folks from the OSC team will be attending, and stop by our booth in the Vendor Hall on the second day and introduce yourself!

EdUI 2009 boasts a powerhouse lineup of renowned and popular headliner speakers, most often found at the Web industry’s premier events. In addition to these, it features a series of presentations, selected through a proposal process, to allow peers, colleagues, and geek kindreds to enlighten one another with their expertise and ideas. Our very own Arin Sime will be speaking on The Facebook API: Thinking About UI in a Social Way.

I am very proud to annouce the first book on Solr has been published by Packt. This has been a labor of love for myself and my co-author David Smiley, and we are excited to see the book now “in the wild!”. Below is a copy of the email sent to the Solr community:

Fellow Solr users,

I’ve finally finished the book “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” with my co-author Eric. We are proud to present the first book on Solr and hope you find it a valuable resource. You can find full details about the book and purchase it here:
http://www.packtpub.com/solr-1-4-enterprise-search-server/book
It can be pre-ordered at a discount now and should be shipping within a week or two. The book is also available through Amazon. You can feel good about the purchase knowing that 5% of each sale goes to support the Apache Software Foundation. For a free sample, there is a portion of chapter 5 covering faceting available as an article online here:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/faceting-in-solr-1.4-enterprise-search-server

By the way, we realize Solr 1.4 isn’t out [quite] yet. It is feature-frozen however, and there’s little in the forthcoming release that isn’t covered in our book. About the only notable thing that comes to mind is the contrib module on search result clustering. However Eric plans to write a free online article available from Packt Publishing on that very subject.

“Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” In Detail:

If you are a developer building a high-traffic web site, you need to have a terrific search engine. Sites like Netflix.com and Zappos.com employ Solr, an open source enterprise search server, which uses and extends the Lucene search library. This is the first book in the market on Solr and it will show you how to optimize your web site for high volume web traffic with full-text search capabilities along with loads of customization options. So, let your users gain a terrific search experience

This book 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 it with other languages and frameworks

This book first gives you a quick overview of Solr, and then gradually takes you from basic to advanced features that enhance your search. It starts off by discussing Solr and helping you understand how it fits into your architecture—where all databases and document/web crawlers fall short, and Solr shines. The main part of the book is a thorough exploration of nearly every feature that Solr offers. To keep this interesting and realistic, we use a large open source set of metadata about artists, releases, and tracks courtesy of the MusicBrainz.org project. Using this data as a testing ground for Solr, you will learn how to import this data in various ways from CSV to XML to database access. You will then learn how to search this data in a myriad of ways, including Solr’s rich query syntax, “boosting” match scores based on record data and other means, about searching across multiple fields with different boosts, getting facets on the results, auto-complete user queries, spell-correcting searches, highlighting queried text in search results, and so on.

After this thorough tour, we’ll demonstrate working examples of integrating a variety of technologies with Solr such as Java, JavaScript, Drupal, Ruby, XSLT, PHP, and Python.

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

Sincerely,

David Smiley (primary-author)
dsmiley@mitre.org
Eric Pugh (co-author)
epugh@opensourceconnections.com

A huge round of thanks goes to David for bringing me into this project and being such a great partner on it! With 5% of the proceeds going to the Apache Software Foundation, here’s hoping it’s a great success!

I’m very pleased to be co-speaking with Wayne Graham at EdUI 2009 at the University of Virginia this September 22nd.  EdUI 2009 posted the full conference schedule today, which included the talk Wayne and I will give.  Here’s the description for our talk:

The Facebook API:  Thinking about UI in a social way

Building an application for the Facebook API is very different than your standard application. The basic concepts and flow of your application need to conform to underlying principles of social media in order for people to use your application and share it with their friends. We will discuss the development and implementation of Facebook applications based on our own experiences and drawing on the best practices of other projects. Wayne will discuss his implementation of the Facebook-Athenaeum project, and Arin will discuss his experiences building an application for fundraising on Facebook. The presentation will be a mixture of high level design concepts, details on the Facebook API, and code examples. 

We’ll be speaking on Day 2, September 22, from 2:15 – 3:00 pm.  I’m really looking forward to hearing all the great speakers at this conference, and I’m honored to have a chance to present with Wayne at EdUI!

Working at a small company like OSC allows for group bonding “work” activities such as RailsRumble, which create a good working environment and helps develop our skills. If you don’t know what RailsRumble is, it’s a competition where teams of 1 up to 4 members develop a Ruby on Rails application in 48 hours from scratch. If you don’t know what Ruby on Rails is, you can’t be saved . The competition is fun, or at least the OSC team is fun (no bias what so ever) because you get together with a group of people, sometimes teams share office space, and work your brain until you pass out. One of the things this competition teaches us is managing time. What you can do in 48 hours might vary from person to person, but it’s still 48 hours people!

Our entry for 2008, see blog posts here and here, used a SMS service called Zeep Mobile. We needed to be able to communicate with our users, specially those who would be using our app on the go, and texting was the best solution. We came up with the idea for our app the day the competition started, so we didn’t have time to do a lot of research on providers and available APIs for such a service. In retrospect, Zeep Mobile still seems the best free solution there. The one problem with this service is that the learning curve turned out to be too steep for the 48 hours we had.

One of my teammates was charged with handling the integration between Zeep Mobile and our application. That task took about a day, half the time we had to build EVERYTHING! That is too much time. So a light bulb lit above my head. I always wanted to contribute to the rails community but have never had the way to do it. I have no experience building plugins or gems, so this was a good project to learn. Unfortunately, I discovered what my teammate had a year ago, how hard it is to integrate Zeep Mobile!!!

No Worries! ZeepIt is here to help

My first plugin, ZeepIt, is designed to get your app ready to go with Zeep Mobile. All you have to do is install the plugin and you automatically have a URL for Zeep Mobile to forward SMS to and a way to parse those texts. The plugin uses the zeep/messaging gem provided by Zeep Mobile to provide a the MVC structure needed to leverage the service.

The plugin is available on GitHub: http://github.com/ychaker/zeep_it/tree/master
Documentation is available on Rdoc.info: http://rdoc.info/projects/ychaker/zeep_it
References:

• RailsCasts
• Ruby on Rails guides
• RailsMagazine
• Zeep Mobile
• Google (of course)

If you have any comments, questions or concerns please feel free to contact me which ever way you like. I would love to hear your feedback. ZeepIt is also on twitter @ZeepIt. (by the way, as I said, it’s my first plugin, so be gentle)