Preface

Solr is a popular and robust open source enterprise search platform from Apache Lucene. Solr is Java-based and runs as a standalone search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty. It is built of Lucene Java search library as the core, which is primarily used for full-text indexing and searching. Additionally, Solr core consists of REST-like HTML/XML and JSON APIs, which makes it easy to be virtually compatible with any programming and/or scripting language. Solr is extremely scalable and its external configuration allows you to use it efficiently without any Java coding. Moreover, due to its extensive plugin architecture, you can even customize it as and when required.

Solr's salient features include robust full-text search, faceted search, real-time indexing, clustering, document (Word, PDF, and so on) handling, and geospacial search. Reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance capabilities make Solr even more demanding to the developers, especially to SEO and DevOp professionals.