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The dominant deployment model for Solr is running it as a standalone webapp. You can use it in embedded mode in Java but then you are missing some of the goodies like the seperate JVM (your GC will thank you for it) and you are of course tied to Java then.
When working on a larger Maven project it might happen that you lose track of the dependecies in your project. Over time you are adding new dependencies, remove code or move code to modules so some of the dependencies become obsolete. Though I did lots of Maven projects I have to admit I didn't know until recently that the dependency plugin contains a useful goal for solving this problem: dependency:analyze.
Last week I have shown how you can use the classic spatial support in Solr. It uses the LatLonType to index locations that can then be used to query, filter or sort by distance. Starting with Solr 4.2 there is a new module available. It uses the Lucene Spatial module which is more powerful but also needs to be used differently. You can still use the old approach but in this post I will show you how to use the new features to do the same operations we saw last week.
Solr is mainly known for its full text search capabilities. You index text and are able to search it in lowercase or stemmed form, depending on your analyzer chain. But besides text Solr can do more: You can use RangeQueries to query numeric fields ("Find all products with a price lower than 2€"), do date arithmetic ("Find me all news entries from last week") or do geospatial queries, which we will look at in this post. What I am describing here is the old spatial search support. Next week I will show you how to do the same things using recent versions of Solr.
It's now 20 months that I am working as a freelancer on my own. With the end of year thing going on it's time to look back on what happened and I would like to take the chance to write about what I did, what works and what I would like to do in the future.