Rafal Ku - Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook

Rafa Ku is a born team leader and software developer. Right now, he holds the position of Software Architect, and Solr and Lucene specialist. He has eight years of experience in various software branches, from banking software to the e-commerce products. He is mainly focused on Java, but is open to every tool and programming language that will make the achievement of his goal easier and faster. Rafa is also one of the founders of the solr.pl site where he tries to share his knowledge and help people with their problems with Solr and Lucene.

Rafa began his journey with Lucene in 2002 and it wasn't love at first sight. When he came back to Lucene in late 2003, he revised his thoughts about the framework and saw the potential in search technologies. Then Solr came and that was it. From then, Rafa has concentrated on search technologies and data analysis. Right now, Lucene and Solr are his main points of interest. Many Polish e-commerce sites use Solr deployments that were made with the guidance of Rafa and with the use of tools developed by him.

The writing of this book was a big thing for me. It took almost all of my free time for the last six months. Of course, this was my sacrifice and if I were to make that decision today, it would be the same. However, the ones that suffered from this the most was my family my wife Agnes and our son Philip. Without their patience for the always busy husband and father, the writing of this book wouldn't have been possible. Furthermore, the last drafts and corrections were made, when we were waiting for our daughter to be born, so it was even harder for them. I would like to thank all the people involved in creating, developing, and maintaining Lucene and Solr projects for their work and passion. Without them, this book wouldn't be written. Last, but not least, I would like to thank all the people who made the writing of this book possible, and who listened to my endless doubts and thoughts, especially Marek Rogoziski. Your point-of-view helped me a lot. I'm not able to mention you all, but you all know who you are. Once again, thank you.

Ravindra Bharathi holds a master's degree in Structural Engineering and started his career in the construction industry. He took up software development in 2001 and has since worked in domains such as education, digital media marketing/advertising, enterprise search, and energy management systems. He has a keen interest in search-based applications that involve data visualization, mashups, and dashboards. He blogs at http://ravindrabharathi.blogspot.com.

Juan Grande is an Informatics Engineering student at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has worked with Java-related technologies since 2005, when he started as web applications developer, gaining experience in technologies such as Struts, Hibernate, and Spring. Since 2010, he has worked as search consultant for Plug Tree. He also works as an undergraduate teaching assistant in programming-related subjects since 2006. His other topic of interest is experimental physics, where he has a paper published.

I want to acknowledge Plug Tree for letting me get involved in this project, and specially Toms Fernndez Lbbe for introducing me to the fascinating world of Solr.