Off late, I've been doing a lot of development with Railo running on JBoss. So naturally, I wanted to plug in Apache Solr (which now ships with ColdFusion 9) into my JBoss instance running Railo.

What I thought would be straight-forward took a bit to figure out. The issue comes when you have to setup the solr.home property. The Apache Solr wiki suggests putting an <env-entry> node in the web.xml. However, if you do that, the XML does not validate as "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN". JBoss 5 is a little particular about web.xml validating properly -- which is a good thing!

So the trick to declare Solr home variable is to do this:

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If you work with Lucene, then you know that you need to write your own GUI for testing the Lucene index. This can be a little annoying as the purpose of using Lucene is to quickly index content and retrieve it. Writing a GUI to test if Lucene is indexing the content correctly detracts from the purpose of using Lucene.

I was really kicked to find this nifty little utility called "Luke" that provides a GUI for testing Lucene indexes that have been created. I've been using it for a about an hour now, and simply love it.

Luke can be downloaded from this site.