Summary

Erik Hatcher, of Lucid Imagination, came all the way from Charlottesville to school us on some Solr and Lucene. He even did some live coding!

It seemed a number of people’s interest was piqued given the nature of their questions. Even though not many people are currently using Solr, I feel after Erik’s talk they’re thinking about how easy it is to integrate into their app.

Attendance

Did we have the largest turn out? Definitely for this year! We had a total 17 people at tonight’s meeting; 7 from Cville (this includes Erik). You guys Rock! We had 6 brand new faces attend. Definitely keep spreading the word.

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

Here are some links where you can get some additional information:

• http://www.lucidimagination.com/

• http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Next Meeting

Be sure to come out next month (10 Mar) when we’ll have two speakers: Erlang, ScrumPad. I’ll post additional information in a separate posting.

Announcement

Last but definitely not least I want to say something about tonight’s sponsor: Engine Yard. They were kind enough to pay for this month’s dinner and provide t-shirts for give away. They’re also going to pick up March’s food bill and more t-shirts will be given away.

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 10 Febraruy
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

Solr brings enterprise-scale search to the masses, building upon the powerful Lucene search library. Interacting with Solr through HTTP makes developing applications in any language or environment straightforward. This talk will demonstrate Solr from the ground up: indexing data, searching it, faceting, highlighting, spellchecking and more. After covering Solr fundamentals, and demonstrating its features live through the command-line and browser, we’ll delve into working with Solr through Ruby, using the solr-ruby library and also discussing the current state of the acts_as_solr ActiveRecord plugin and the work being done with the new RSolr (a solr-ruby refactoring replacement) project, and we’ll also see examples of Flare (a dusty RoR plugin) and other techniques for getting Solr integrated into your applications. After all of the flashy cool stuff, we’ll discuss production considerations for deploying Solr for real such as scaling via replication and distributed search.

Solr for your Rails App

If you’re considering adding search capabilities to your Rails app, do yourself a favor: come out and learn what Solr can do for your application. There are a number of sites/apps using Solr in the ‘real world’.

Come get your search on!

Presenter Bio

Erik Hatcher codes, writes, and speaks about all things Solr, a Lucene-powered search server. He co-authored “Lucene in Action”, has spoken at numerous technical conferences and user groups around the world, and has consulted with many big name organizations. Erik works for Lucid Imagination, a full-service Lucene/Solr shop.