Sean’s also working on our Django-Alfresco integration. I’m not sure how this project jumped in front of that one. Guess I need to take Sean out for a beer and see if I can’t influence the roadmap a bit. (Half-kidding).

If you want to see the Django-Solr stuff in action, take a look at Sean’s blog. It’s built using Django and he’s got a live example that shows the Solr integration in action.

You can expect several new Optaros-sponsored open source projects to become available throughout the year so stay tuned.

Hibernate Search

What do you do when your customers add “Google-like search” to the list of requirements for the web application you are delivering? With a straight relational back-end, implementing that requirement might be tougher than you’d think. Just a few challenges are:

• “Keyword” search means you’re probably going to want to use wildcards which perform poorly.
• Your data is scattered across multiple columns. Writing a SQL query to search them all is ugly.
• SQL doesn’t really know how to deal with typical search constructs like proximity, synonyms, or relevance.

Hibernate Search is the answer. It combines the power of the proven Apache Lucene search engine with the ease of configuration of Hibernate. Hooking Hibernate Search into your app is a matter of dropping in a couple of JAR files and adding annotations to your classes to describe what should and shouldn’t be indexed.

Hibernate Shards

What do you do when you can’t (or don’t want to) put all of your data in the same relational database? Google’s word for horizontal partitioning–taking horizontal slices of your database and storing each slice in a separate physical database–is called “sharding”. Give a few Google engineers passionate about the subject a few months and Hibernate Shards is the result (Google donated the project to JBoss).

Shards lets you come up with your own scheme for how rows will be partitioned. Each partition is called a shard. Once you’ve settled on a scheme it’s a matter of configuration through familiar Hibernate configuration constructs. If you don’t use any of the out-of-the-box implementations for how to decide which shard to create and find objects on or for how to generate ID’s, you’ll have to implement those interfaces as well. Once you’ve got everything in place, persisting and querying objects works the same way as straight Hibernate.

Notable newcomers include open source ECM and Portal platforms Alfresco and Plone. Wiki software provider, SocialText, returns for a second year.

EMC Software (Documentum), a long-time EContent 100 stalwart, having appeared every year since 2001, did not make the 2005 list, but Autonomy, now with a three-peat, did.

“Our goal was to be sure that those who make the list again and again don’t do so out of habit or mindshare, but rather because they continue to innovate and deliver products and services that further the evolution of digital content,” said Michelle Manafy, Editor of EContent magazine.

If you do get a Mini, make sure you are up-to-date on patches. eWeek is reporting a security flaw in the device.

Google Goes after Verity Customers

Of course, Google could smell blood in the water and what better way to give a boost to its customer base than to give away its cheapest appliance?

Google, IBM Team Up on PC desktop search