The book Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server by David Smiley and OSC’s own Eric Pugh will be published next month from Packt Publishing.  You can find out more about the book at the Packt Publishing website.  Some of the topics that the book covers include: 

• Blend structured data with real search features
• Import CSV formatted data, XML, common document formats, and from databases
• Deploy Solr and provide reference to Solr’s query syntax from the basics to range queries
• Enhance search results with spell-checking, auto-completing queries, highlighting search results, and more.
• Secure Solr
• Integrate a host of technologies with Solr from the server side to client-side JavaScript, to frameworks like Drupal
• Scale Solr using replication, distributed searches, and tuning

Working with Packt has been a real pleasure, as they have been understanding about slipping deadlines and Eric’s propensity to abuse his apostrophe key.  We’re looking forward to the feedback from the book and seeing growth of the adoption of Solr.  Also, thanks to Dave Smiley for allowing Eric to work with him on the book!

The University of Virginia sought a solution to make all text documents in their Digital Collection Library text-searchable. Containing thousands of documents, the search engine needed to be capable of a rapid and complete search without crashing the back end. UVA selected OpenSource Connections as their partner on this project because of our work in the open source world and academia’s preference for free and open software. Their solution was BlacklightDL. The back end runs on Solr, an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. The end-user interface is built on Ruby on Rails (RoR), allowing a rapid solution to UVA’s data overload. The end result is a license-free solution that will enable thousands of student, faculty and staff users to quickly search UVA’s entire Digital Collection Library library from their PC.

Dr. Mike Bergman gives a detailed overview of the application in “A Not so Long Wave at BlackLight.”

Yesterday Yonik committed my first contribution to [Solr](http://lucene.apache.org/solr). It was a simple simplification of the test code infrastruture. Some of the tests depend on Java System properties, however if you are not running the tests from Ant, you don’t have them… For example, running them from Eclipse. The advice was to pass them in using -D parameters, but that isn’t very user friendly! So I did a tweak that set those System properties in the Java code. I posted the patch to the mailing list, and Yonik committed them as revision [551701](http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/lucene/solr/trunk/src/java/org/apache/solr/util/TestHarness.java?view=diff&pathrev=551701&r1=551700&r2=551701)

What I realized is that one of the best ways to get to know a new community is to contribute to the test code. As an unknown quantity, suggesting major new features or architecture changes won’t go over well, but contributing/fixing/updating tests shows that you are eager to learn how the community works, and not just trying to get your cool new feature added. Writing tests for OSWorkflow and OSUser was how I became a committer over at [OpenSymphony](http://www.opensymphony.com/), only later did I start writing actual product code.

Also, by digging through the unit tests, you really get to learn how the code works, and where the pitfalls are as well!