Capturing The Geek

Apache Solr as Windows service

I'm planning a series on Lucene/Solr integration with NHibernate & Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC in the coming weeks but thought this might interest those planning to use Solr on Windows. 

Background

We're using Solr to meet search requirements for an enterprise sized application. Tightly coupled to our ORM (NHibernate) event listeners it's availability and readiness, for both search queries and data inserts/updates, is paramount.

Although our Solr instances run on linux boxes I wanted to give us the option of deploying to Windows boxes in a production environment, not to mention give our team one less thing to do in the morning - start it!

Considerations

• Fully-fledged Windows service with stop/start/restart
• Must be able to start upon boot (without user interaction)
• Handle unexpected shut-downs/hangs properly (& release javaw32.exe)
• Automatically restart in the event of failure
• Log output from the application console
• Some kind of notification in the event of failure (email)

Java Service Wrapper

The prospect of having to write this ourselves was quite daunting as the time/resource would quite frankly outweigh slapping another linux server in the data-centre. However after some searching I came across the Java Service Wrapper. Available in in many flavours (including a free community version) it both meets our needs and brings some extra features welcome in a production environment.

One comment Used tags: daemon, java, javavm, service, solr, windows, wrapper

DDD8 - Developer conference

It seems many years since I attended any geeky conferences or user-groups, in fact whilst at Microsoft in Reading yesterday it dawned on me it's been nearly 10 years since I was last there, and suspect it was the release of C# that had brought me on that occasion. My day at DDD8 yesterday reminded me how much I'd been missing out.

I had intended the conference for over a month but the election of my work colleague Rob Ashton to do a talk on multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC projects made it all the more exciting, especially with half our department in tow to help brief them on the technologies and methodologies they would soon be using when joining our team.

No comments Used tags: ddd8, developer, microsoft, mono, monotouch, mvc, technologies, web