Tonight I met someone from a (largish) local company and learned they’re migrating their search functionality to SOLR. This is the second largish company in the area I know that’s migrating to SOLR. I’m not naming names only because I’m not sure they’d want me to do so. Suffice it to say these are names fairly well known in the marketing and communications industries.
I’m not surprised at all by the adoption, as SOLR makes it pretty easy to get started using the power of Lucene without requiring you to do a lot of setup or administration up front. These ‘sane defaults’, as I believe Erik Hatcher put it to me, are what give projects like SOLR a competitive advantage against even commercial offerings. Whether technology is good or bad is often secondary to whether it’s easy to get it to a testing stage.
If you’re using SOLR, what was the deciding factor? Ease of setup? Flexibility? Compatibility with existing Lucene data?
If you’re not using SOLR for your data search needs, what are you using? Raw Lucene? Xapian? Sphinx? A commercial product? If so, which one?
P.S If you’re not sure how to go about implementing search for your site and have some questions, email me – mgkimsal@gmail.com.
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Former colleague mentioned @ developerworks – PHP/SOLR
Former colleague Donovan Jimenez had his PHP/SOLR client plugged as the “most robust” PHP client for SOLR at IBM’s developerworks site. Not much else to plug here, but if you’re interested in doing SOLR with PHP, his client does the job admirably. I’m using it in my matchorclash.com site right now too. Grab Donovan’s client here.
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Few ideas from last week
I had a few ideas from last week that I wanted to throw out here for posterity.
Grahame was talking about Haskell, and I asked if he was going to wait for JHaskell – or Jaskell – before adopting it. We then quickly realized Raskell (a ruby version) and Paskell (php/perl/python version) would be good computer language names. If anyone wants to make a version of Haskell that runs on top of Ruby, please call is Raskell. Hilarity will ensue.
Gazpacho ice cream and Bar-B-Q yogurt. ’nuff said.
Speaking with Kevin from discogs.com, he suggested that SOLR would be an invaluable part of every LAMP stack. LAMPS is an obvious acronym, but is not terribly inventive. PALMS is OK too, but much like PALM handhelds. My view is that SLAPM (pronounced “slap ‘em”) would be the best acronym. SOLR on Linux with Apache, MySQL and PHP.
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OSCON – catch up
Wow – the connection to my server from the convention center just died yesterday. I could traceroute all the way to something internal to the data center, but it just stopped. I need to determine if some iptables crap triggered to block me out (why would that have happened?)
So, yesterday afternoon was great. I had a brainwave (why so late in the game?) to record people directly from the board. I got Mark Pruett talking about AJAX tradeoffs (learned something new about the proxypass trick). I got the head developer from Zimbra talking about the Zimbra desktop (can’t find his name right now). I got Robert Treat from OmniTI talking about running PHP in PostgreSQL. Who else…? I got the windmill guys (Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian) one-on-one about the project and what’s upcoming. Also, I got Clinton Nixon, ex-lulu, doing his talk on ‘untangling legacy PHP code’. I’ve invited him to come talk to our PHP group in 2 weeks – I need to ping David @ tripug about this, but it shouldn’t be a problem.
I was going to do a BOF on SOLR specifically, but there was a BOF on ‘open source search’ run by Peter Zaitsev, from the mysqlperformanceblog.com, a blog I catch up with on a regular basis. I believe Peter is involved in the sphinx project, a fulltext project for MySQL. The BOF brought some questions for me about SOLR, though I don’t have all the experience to answer the in depth questions. I think I was seen as a representative of the SOLR project, and as such, I should know all the nooks and crannies. In a way, I probably *am* a rep, but not in an official capacity. Peter wants to get in touch to work on some benchmark comparisons between SOLR and MySQL (sphinx?). Not sure what that’ll actually demonstrate, and if I’m in over my head I’ll pass this off to Yonik Seeley, Erik Hatcher or someone else from the SOLR project with more experience. 
(BTW, Monty was there with more black vodka!)
I got to meet Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, huge names in the PHP world. I’ve known them through their reputation (as good authors and nice people) for several years, and it was great to finally meet them in person, however briefly. Hopefully we’ll be able to meet up again today or at a future conference.
Watching Jimmy Wales’ presentation right now. (He looks like Chuck Norris, at least from certain angles.) Interesting talk about upcoming wikia directions, and a bit of the history of wikipedia. Not anything I didn’t know already, but interesting to listen to.
Side note: One of the things I’ve noticed listening to all the speakers the past few days is how many ‘crutch words/phrases’ people use – “ya know”, “ummm”, “uhhh”, “like”, etc. I recorded myself and will be listening for my own violations. Having gone to Toastmasters for awhile now it’s ingrained in me to listen for those words, and it’s hard to break that habit when listening for ‘content’ only.
Not too many tracks of pressing interest today – not that they’re bad, just nothing that jumps out as a pressing need for my day to day work. I’ll see what strikes my fancy in a bit, and we’ll take it from there.
Anyone reading this that wants to meet up this afternoon for drinks, a chat, or more in depth web/search chat, email me (mgkimsal@gmail.com) or cell (919-455-8488).
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OSCON live recap (and solr BOF tonight)
So, I hit a couple more sessions last night. The ‘high performance web pages’ talk from Steve @ Yahoo wasn’t open – SRO apparently. Instead, I caught the end of “Profiling PHP apps” (Reilly). I missed the beginning, but was hoping to get a bit of something out of it. I did – a reference to wincachegrind (also referenced multiple times in comments on another post here).
I did end up meeting up with Ben Ramsey and George Schlossnagle. I’ve talked on and off for years with George, and met his brother Theo, but we’d never met in person before. Very nice guy. Ben was good to see as well, and recently became a dad. I was surprised that he was able to make it at all! I gave both George and Ben copies of my ‘work in progress‘ book about the PHP job market, ideally getting some feedback from each of them with criticisms and pointers about how to make it better.
I checked out the ‘scrum war stories’ ‘birds of a feather’ session last night, run by Eric Pugh. It was interesting to hear other peoples’ experiences with scrum and agile methodologies. There was another person (Bill West) from Raleigh, who’s also been to the Agile Artisans group run by Jared Richarson (who’s also here speaking today – if you are doing Rails and want to tune your apps, check out Jared at 1:45 today – he’s a good speaker and great guy). We then checked out the MySQL session with “pizza and beer”. I had pizza and some home made “black vodka” personally made and poured by Monty himself! It was *strong*! I think I took 4 years off my esophagus last night with those few ounces.
I’m watching Bill Hilf’s keynote right now, and will be attending a lot of web dev sessions today, and am going to try to corner some people today for a webdevradio podcast interview.
Lastly, I’m hosting a SOLR “hands on” BOF tonight at 8:30. There were a number of people who had some SOLR questions after yesterday’s presentation which I didn’t get a chance to respond to. Hopefully a few people will stop by tonight and we’ll go over any more questions or demos people want to see, or others will stop by and share their success stories (please drop by!)
If you’re at OSCON and want to get togethe
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SOLR presentation
I ended up running over just a bit in my presentation, and didn’t quite get through all my slides (missed the last 3). For anyone that wanted to see how it ends, download the files from http://www.webdevradio.com/solr_oscon.tgz. The only thing I didn’t demonstrate in detail was the PHP/SOLR search code, which is running at http://www.pfblogs.com/v2/ right now.
I’m currently at the MySQL Internals with Monty and Jay (Pipes), but it’s a bit over my head. I guess I wasn’t expecting this many internals at an ‘internals’ talk – Monty is getting in to the speed performance of different iterator classes and whatnot – a bit too low-level for me. Very interesting nonetheless, just not something I can use in my day to day work.
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Hosted wordpress search service
Going through SOLR putting together my presentation, I’ve restarted thinking of my hosted SOLR service I was considering some time ago. I was thinking last night that a hosted blog search – wordpress, to start with – would be a great service, and pretty easy to set up. WordPress “search” functionality is something that seems to be moderately high on the ‘wanted’ list. My primary concern is how to offer this and perhaps make a bit of money off of it. Should the service be locked down by IP? Or user/pass/key? The akismet service sounds like a good model, except that it’d probably require even more horsepower than akismet because that is only run once per comment posted. This functionality might be run multiple times per visitor to a blog. Perhaps it’s free for the first 200 entries or something like that. Many small blogs only have a few entries and comments, so offering it to free for them would get some traction. Some payment per month for larger accounts might make sense. Or perhaps the results page could be hosted, and offer ads on that? That’d probably upset people, although hosted Google search probably does that already.
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