Another Attempt At Python

jon — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:32:13 +0000

I tried Python out a while ago, but stopped trying it to learn it after some major frustrations. Maybe I didn’t dig deep enough into it. I found the documentation hard to read, and the module layout seemed a little random at times. For some reason I found executing an external process and getting the results to be a little convoluted. (Since then I’ve learned to use popen(..).communicate())

I ended up messing with other languages to try to find one that suits my tastes, like Erlang and D. I read through 7 languages in 7 weeks, and not really getting a lot out of it. I didn’t fall in love with ruby at all and I’m not going to actually use Prolog anywhere, even if I thought it was pretty cool. I never liked Java, and I wasn’t impressed with Scala.

The closest I’ve gotten to a new favorite is Erlang. I’ve written a whole slew of posts about it. I like Erlang’s process management, message passing, and the OTP libraries. I like talking about it with people and I advocate it’s advantages. But when it comes time to write it, I find it to be clumsy and awkward, the syntax annoying and the external libraries painful. For instance, trying to work with a MongoDB database just doesn’t feel right. My mind likes OO code, and I’m done fighting it. So time to try something else.

I thought D was really interesting, but unfortunately it looks like no one is using it. It’s not even clear which compiler I should use, and the installation instructions were incorrect when I tried to set it up. Not a big selling point, and I gave that up pretty quickly.

So, another look at Python. Working with threads in Python kind of sucks. If you have multiple cores, it doesn’t really care. That’s unfortunate. However, after reading through convos in IRC (#python on freenode) I’ve found a few things that are making me give it another look. For instance, the multiprocessing module seems to address my gripes about processes / threads. Yes we’re creating OS processes, but I really only need a few (5, 10 maybe?) so having a few running shouldn’t be a problem, and the OS will take care of loading up my cores for me. It’s got great support for MongoDB (my shiny new toy) and I like it’s clean syntax. I think tornado looks really cool and I’m excited to write a stand alone server that I can bundle instead of requiring nginx configs and complicated setups.

So… I’m back writing Python. We’ll see how it goes.

How to Install the Lucene Search Engine using Solr

jon — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:01:26 +0000

I’m going to go through the steps necessary to install and start using Solr. I’ve always been interested in trying out Lucene, but I never felt like dealing with writing my own wrapper around the classes. Solr simplifies this by creating a fully working search engine as a web service.

Let’s get started. You’ll need to check to see if Java is up to date. Run the below to find out.

java -version

You need to be running at least Java 1.5. Next is to check to see if Ant is installed. Do that with.

ant -version

I’m doing this on my Mac using Leopard. Here’s some instructions on setting up Ant if you aren’t using Leopard.

Java was up to date, and ant is built in. Sweet. However, I need to install JUnit. I’ll do that first.

Download JUnit. You’ll need to put it somewhere that’s accessible by the $CLASSPATH variable. There’s more information on the JUnit FAQ.

I threw it in /usr/share and left the name as junit-4.4.jar and set my CLASSPATH to point to that file (not the directory)

export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/share/junit-4.4.jar

I ran that, as well as put it in my /etc/bashrc file (which you must be root to edit) so I don’t have to deal with it again.

Compile Solr

Switch back to the directory containing the solr files, and run:

ant compile

You should see something like this:

Buildfile: build.xml

init-forrest-entities:

checkJunitPresence:

compile:
[javac] Compiling 185 source files to /Users/jhaddad/src/apache-solr-1.2.0/build
[javac] Note: Some input files use or override a deprecated API.
[javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.
[javac] Note: Some input files use unchecked or unsafe operations.
[javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds

I then ran:

ant dist

Which outputted something like this:

Buildfile: build.xml

init-forrest-entities:

checkJunitPresence:

compile:

make-manifest:
[mkdir] Created dir: /Users/jhaddad/src/apache-solr-1.2.0/build/META-INF

dist-jar:
[jar] Building jar: /Users/jhaddad/src/apache-solr-1.2.0/dist/apache-solr-1.2.1-dev.jar

dist-war:
[war] Building war: /Users/jhaddad/src/apache-solr-1.2.0/dist/apache-solr-1.2.1-dev.war

dist:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

You can run the example by going to the example directory and running

java -jar start.jar

Then go here: http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/ and check out your admin.

Load a few sample docs by going here:

/example/exampledocs

and running

java -jar post.jar solr.xml monitor.xml

I will post a follow up on how to get Solr running in Tomcat, as well as examples on how to use the server.

Rusty Razor Blade » java

Another Attempt At Python

How to Install the Lucene Search Engine using Solr