The SquizLog

Lucene + Beer

I had no idea that somebody could convey so much enthusiasm about a tool that does searching and text analysis in Java. But that's exactly what Matt "Spud" Quail, who hails from Australia's national capital, achieved in his presentation about Lucene and FishEye this evening at the Sydney Geek Night.

Matt clearly digs Lucene. As he was at pains to point out, no matter what search criteria provided, due to the magic of Lucene's search algorithm, it never takes more than 16 milliseconds! Well, that was his plug anyway. As he explains in more detail here, it is Lucene's technique of transforming a search by implementing an inverted index which performs the trick of enabling a search to complete in a time of the order of O(1) rather than O(N).

Apart from the technical details of Matt's talk, which I certainly appreciated, I heartily recommend the Sydney Geek Night to anyone who lives in the vicinity of Sydney, is interested in geeky, Java-related things (strange, no females present in an audience of about 20) and enjoys good beer. The vibe was buzzing after the formalities of the presentation had concluded.

Despite the fact that there has been an exodus of smart Java people from some circles recently, on tonight's evidence there are plenty of active neurons still focussed on Java in and around Sydney.

Update: Matt has placed the presentation and links to other resources here.

Posted to Software Development by Keith Pitty