Tested software agent server with Apache Solr trunk (4.x)

Last week I made some enhancements to the new Base Technology Software Agent Server and tested it accessing the recently released Apache Solr 3.6 enterprise search platform. My test was quite simple, one test that added a few documents to a Solr collection, and the other test performing a few queries of that collection, all via the HTTP protocol, using XML to send data and receive results.

 

Earlier this week I downloaded the latest "nightly trunk build" for the next generation of Solr, referred to simply as "Solr trunk" or "4.x". My tests from Solr 3.6 worked fine except for one test case that checked the raw XML text and there one one nuance of difference - in 3.6 a zero-result query generates an XML empty-element tag for the "result" element, but in Solr 4.x a start tag and separate end tag are generated. No big deal.

 

As alluded to last week, I added the option to disable "writing" to the web (HTTP POST.) This option defaults to "disabled", which is safest. You need to set the "implicitly_deny_web_write_access" property to "false" in the agentserver.properties file in order to send documents to Solr from an agent running in the software agent server, but this is not needed if you are simply trying to query an already indexed document collection, which is most of what I was interested in anyway. Having the ability for an agent to actually add documents to Solr was simply an added benefit.

-- Jack Krupansky