Sunday, October 9, 2016

Luke 6.2.1 release and all things open source

Release

Indeed, luke 6.2.1 for lucene 6.2.1 is out of the oven. This is the proud moment for Tomoko Uchida, my co-committer to have been a release manager for the first time. Congrats, Tomoko!

Community

As luke gets more and more stargazers on github (520 at the time of this writing), I tend to glance over the list of them which sometimes makes my day. But beyond that and more importantly, this lays out the community of Lucene / Solr / Elasticsearch users and developers, that hopefully enjoy using luke too. 

Big names on user list

Having access to the stats of the luke repo gives insights on who and when might be talking about luke. This time, it is PayPal Engineering. And here is their nice technical writeup on indexing lots of data in Elasticsearch and field usage of luke for optimizing the lucene index data structures: https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2016/08/10/powering-transactions-search-with-elastic-learnings-from-the-field/

London Lucene/Solr hackday

Hackday is an amazing way to jump out of a routine and think big: what can be improved in the search land of Lucene / Solr technology and tooling? It was great to see that luke was picked up as one topic on the Lucene / Solr hackday in London: https://github.com/flaxsearch/london-hackday-2016. And there it is, Marple, browser-driven explorer for lucene indexes: https://github.com/flaxsearch/marple. Go check it out.

New contributors to luke

Tomoko and I have been active promoting luke on various occasions, Lucene / Solr Revolution 2015 and  ApacheCon 2015. And of course on twitter. Recently Florian Hopf has become active in sending pull requests to improve luke and fix various nagging issues. Welcome!