Apache Solr is the most widely used full text search solution. Almost all the websites today use Solr to provide the search function. Development of the search feature with a basic Solr setup is the starting point. At a later stage, most developers find it imperative to delve into Solr to provide solutions to certain problems or add specific features. This book will provide a developer working on Solr with a deeper insight into Solr. The book will also provide strategies and concepts that are employed in the development of different solutions using Solr. You will not only learn how to tweak Solr, but will also understand how to use it to handle big data and solve scalability problems.
Chapter 1, Solr Indexing Internals, delves into how indexing happens in Solr and how analyzers and tokenizers work during index creation.
Chapter 2, Customizing the Solr Scoring Algorithm, discusses different scoring algorithms in Solr and how to tweak these algorithms and implement them in Solr.
Chapter 3, Solr Internals and Custom Queries, discusses in-depth how relevance calculation happens and how scorers and filters work internally in Solr. This chapter will outline how to create custom plugins in Solr.
Chapter 4, Solr for Big Data, focuses on churning out big data for analysis purposes, including various faceting concepts and tools that can be used with Solr in order to plot graphs and charts.
Chapter 5, Solr in E-commerce, discusses the problems faced during the implementation of Solr in an e-commerce website and the related strategies and solutions.
Chapter 6, Solr for Spatial Search, focuses on spatial capabilities that the current and previous Solr versions possess. This chapter will also cover important concepts such as indexing and searching or filtering strategies together with varied query types that are available with a spatial search.
Chapter 7, Using Solr in an Advertising System, discusses the problems faced during the implementation of Solr to search in an advertising system and the related strategies and solutions.
Chapter 8, AJAX Solr, focuses on an AJAX Solr feature that helps reduce dependency on the application. This chapter will also cover an in-depth understanding of AJAX Solr as a framework and its implementation.
Chapter 9, SolrCloud, provides the complete procedure to implement SolrCloud and examines the benefits of using a distributed search with SolrCloud.
Chapter 10, Text Tagging with Lucene FST, focuses on the basic understanding of an FST and its implementation and guides us in designing an algorithm for text tagging, which can be implemented using FSTs and further integrated with Solr.
You will need a Windows or Linux machine with Apache configured to run the web server. You will also need the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed together with an editor to write Java programs. You will need Solr 4.8 or higher to understand the procedures.
Basic knowledge of working with Solr is required to understand the advanced topics discussed in this book. An understanding of Java programming concepts is required to study the programs discussed in this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meanings.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The mergeFactor class controls how many segments a Lucene index is allowed to have before it is coalesced into one segment."
A block of code is set as follows:
//Create collection of documents to add to Solr server
SolrInputDocument doc1 = new SolrInputDocument();
document.addField("id",1);
document.addField("desc", "description text for doc 1");When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
//Create collection of documents to add to Solr server
SolrInputDocument doc1 = new SolrInputDocument();
document.addField("id",1);
document.addField("desc", "description text for doc 1");Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
java -jar post.jar *.xml
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, appear as follows: "In the index, we can see that the token Harry appears in both documents."
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