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On Saturday I attended an Open Space in Wiesbaden, organized by members of Softwerkskammer Rhein-Main, a very active chapter of the German software craftmanship community. The event took place in the offices of Seibert Media above a shopping mall including a nice view of the city.
Maven was huge for Java Development. It brought dependency management, sane conventions and platform independent builds to the mainstream. If there is a Maven pom file available for an open source project you can be quite sure to manage to build it on your local machine in no time.
Facets are a great search feature that let users easily navigate to the documents they are looking for. Solr makes it really easy to use them though when naively querying for facet values you might see some unexpected behaviour. Read on to learn the basics of what is happening when you are passing in filter queries for faceting. Also, I'll show how you can leverage local params to choose a different query parser when selecting facet values.
While I am using Solr a lot in my current engagement I recently started a pet project with ElasticSearch to learn more about it. Some of its functionality is rather different from Solr so there is quite some experimentation involved. I like to start small and implement tests if I like to find out how things work (see this post on how to write tests for Solr).
I went to a lot, probably too many conferences in 2012. As the year is over now I'd like to summarize some of the impressions, maybe there's a conference you didn't know about and you'd like to attend this year.