Thursday 20 June 2013

Tricity JUG: Apache Lucene in practice

On June, 15th I was one of the participants of the workshop titled "Apache Lucene in practice". The meeting was organized by Tricity Java User Group and was lead by Dominika Puzio and Patryk Makuch, whose previous experience included building search engines for many systems that belongs to Wirtualna Polska. 

Apache Lucene is a high-performace text search engine written entirely in Java. That's the why workshop included developing simple java web application for searching through wikipedia content. The actual wikipedia's contents was already downloaded earlier by organizers and distributed before the event.

The project that was developed during the meeting is pushed to github you can access it through my fork of it. As a participant, I didn't need to spend a lot of time on writting same code as presenters. What I was really doing was just git checkout "next commit" after each step done, and I've only experimented sometimes with the given code. This way I could just listen carefully to the presenters most of the time, as they explained each step with many details. The presenters showed that they have a lot of experience in that field and shared a lot from it.

Should I mention that organizers ordered pizzas for participants? :)

I really enjoyed the workshops. I believe that I've learned a lot and I think that I'm now fully capable of building Lucene-based search engine on my own :). I'm glad that I could participate in the event and I'm looking forward to next TJUG's meetings.


No comments:

Post a Comment