If you will indulge me a moment of (slightly delayed) nostalgia...
This past Saturday (I was traveling) marked the 20th anniversary of the
first public acknowledgement of the existence of Solr -- albeit, not by
name...
https://lists.apache.org/thread/g8t11tf2gs5x2wtdj09o15toxo1q91o7
Subject: Announcement: Lucene powering CNET.com Product Category Listings
At a high level there are four major pieces...
1) A Servlet which abstracts away most of the Lucene index modification
APIs into an HTTP/XML based "web service" by accepting POSTed XML
documents to add/update in the index. It also replies to GET search
requests using query plugins that have access to an IndexReader.
...
IIRC...
At this point in time, Yonik had been working for CNET (on the east coast)
for about a year focused on prototyping a "Lucene Server" -- initially as
a skunkworks project. I had been working (on the west coast) on
"Dynamicly Generated Facet Pages" (secretly) using Lucene since roughly
the same time as Yonik joined the company -- but we didn't know each
other.
When I was "caught" using Lucene ~ Dec 2004, and told to use the approved
database features instead, the performance numbers I showed in my "Either
replace me or leave me the fuck alone" email gave our CTO something to
chew on, and the excuse Yonik's boss was looking for to unveil their
skunkworks project.
So Yonik & I were finally introduced ~ Jan 2005 when our projects were
blessed & merged. Yonik focused on the lower level "engine" that
interacted with Lucene, while I focused on implementing the complex biz
requirements for the facets. We both quietly discussed how to architect
everything so the biz logic specific code could live in "plugins" in the
hope of eventually convincing the CTO to let us contribute the main
"server" to Apache.
Open Source "participation" was a completely new concept to the company at
that point, and it took a lot of approval from multiple tiers of tech
managers for me to even be able to send that email -- but it helped that
my Biz unit site owner (Mark) was really happy with with the engagement
numbers on these new facet pages, and how responsive & interactive they
were (compared with what we had before), so he was happy to let me brag a
little bit.
Mark's boss was pressing us to try and implement "faceted product catalog
search" (something that would have never been possible with the commercial
search engine we were using at the time) in time for the holiday shopping
season. Which meant I was looking into keyword relevancy tuning (facets
were cool, but we had to match documents at least as well as our previous
engine) while Yonik was putting a lot of effort into performance
improvements to handle the additional traffic -- which included upgrading
from Lucene 1.4 -> 1.9.
The speed at which the community was moving forward with improvements;
combined with our ability to iterate on new feature & performance
improvements quickly (due to both the open source nature of Lucene, as
well as the community advice to help solve problems we encountered on the
way); combined with the enthusiasm of the biz teams; were a huge factor in
convincing our previously hostile CTO to go "all in" on contributing
"Solr" to the ASF -- less then a year after I got reprimanding for using
Lucene at all.
I'm skeptical that I'll still be an active member of the Solr community in
another 20 years -- but I am pretty confident that there will still be an
active community, ... and hopefully they will still be sharing their cool
use cases & accomplishments on the mailing list.
-Hoss
http://www.lucidworks.com/
