Jooming with Joomla

The amount of work needed to get a site up and running especially the front end XHTML design part i A LOT.
I came across one excellent CMS solution which can very well be used to develop plain vanilla websites.
 The results are really amazing.
I feel it is much better than Drupal in terms of ease of use and its rich admin features..


It has millions of plugins and themes to choose from. Once you get the knack of placing the plugins and 
using themes into your site, virtually you can achieve amazing results with very less coding effort.

Here are a few notes for Joomla 1.5:

Positioning in CSS is the key for each module. You need to understand the positioning after reading the CSS.
The module name is the key in css that needs to be mentioned in the new module's postion attribute. Eg: left, top, right, user3, use4 , etc

To add a search box in home page
 Extensions --> Module Manager -->new--> search

To add a menu
 Extensions -->Module manager --> new --> menu.
   Be careful to give the position of the menu as the one in HTML theme...eg: 

News in home page
   Define a section news, then a category for news. Add article for this category.
   Extensions-->  Module manager --> new --> news flash
   Choose the category which holds articles for news..thats it.

Contact us 
   Menus --> new --> Internal link--contacts

Gallery
  Download a plugin extension like MorfeoShow. Add this module and configure..


Watch out for this space. more to come....joom jooom joooooomla

Spring MVC

Spring has many controllers.
SimplefFormController is an interesting one to work with.
I try to disect this in this blog posting.

TODO: More to come here:

A good source for understanding is available at
http://raibledesigns.com/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SpringControllers

http://www.springify.com/

Lucene

Lucene is an excellent text search engine.
Solr a sub project of lucene provides web based interface handling XML requests and executing XML commands .
"Solr is more of a general-purpose search server, and it assumes you already have structured data (like   catalog data, music collections,etc)."
Nutch again a sub project of lucene is an excellent web crawler.
"Nutch is more like an open-source google... it's for crawling, converting, indexing, and searching websites."
Assuming you have an existing J2ee application with struts and hibernate. The following major components/classes would be required if we consider to use lucene or solr:

1. Search Index writer:  This will use existing hibernate methods/APIs to read the records (which need to be searched) and create lucene indeces. The index can be stored  on the disk or in a database via JDBC. Lucene calls these index records as documents and will have relevant information to display in search result.

 2. Search index reader: This will read the index stored(on disk or database by step 1.) and return the search result. There is no hibernate method calls involved as the lucene index is separate from database. To display the search result, the struts action classes would need to be altered/added. However on click of the search result for details of the record, the existing struts/hibernate(if it is available)  functionality will be used to display the details of a record.


Basically you can think of it as a search engine implementation(like google) where you index the records(like websites) and search results will contain only the basic information. The detailed information is delivered on click of a link on search result.



Coming to Solr, this is basically a web service wrapper on top of lucene. Under the hood it also builds lucene index. The advantage of Solr being it is web service based so it is easy to sync index in a distributed environment. Also it provides caching, index syncing etc out of the box.



Gotchas and Tips:
Sorting:
 Need to maintain a duplicate field which is NOT_ANALYZED.
 **** sorting is case sensitive *****
 sorting field value can be having a fixed max length say 20 ... this improves performance.
Indexing:
 Analyzer used for indexing and searching should be the same.
 StandardAnalyzer can be extended to have HTMLStripReader and ISOLatin1AccentFilter.



Links:

Syntax supported:
http://lucene.apache.org/java/1_4_3/queryparsersyntax.html

Solr + Jquery sample:
http://solrjs.solrstuff.org/test/reuters/

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=43617

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/08/09/solr-indexing-xml-with-lucene-andrest.html

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-solr-update/?S_TACT=105AGX01&S_CMP=HP