Being at the fore of Apache Solr and Lucene Development

JTeam has always prided itself on being at the forefront of custom software development and exceeding customer expectations. This has been further confirmed with the release of the most voted for features for Apache Solr 1.5, the next version to be developed.

As highlighted by Grant Ingersoll, the Solr committer who released the figures, the most voted for feature by far is field collapsing, otherwise known as result grouping, an extension to Solr primarily developed and maintained by my colleague Martijn van Groningen. Field collapsing allows results which have the same value for a certain field to be collapsed into a single result. This can prove useful when you get 1000 variations of the same heater as the result of a query, as is the case for one of our current customers. You can find out more about field collapsing from Martijn’s blog entries.

The second most voted for feature is incorporating Local Lucene/Solr. This extension allows Solr users to conduct location based searches, such as where are pizza shops near my house, through the Spatial Lucene contrib. I personally have been very involved in the development and presentation of this feature, and I have followed up on my initial contributions with a fully refactored version that is available here on the JTeam. We will be contributing these developments, particularly those on the Lucene side, back to the community in a matter of days.

We have used both features in multiple projects and have always received very positive responses. However, both features are still only Jira issues, so if you haven’t already voted for them, please do, so we can ensure that they become part of the next version of Solr.