As humans, we are constantly being bombarded with data throughout our lives. Thanks to the superb filtering and attention abilities of our brains we are able to make sense of all this information. Java programs and web apps need to rely on Lucene for this ability. Using Lucene, apps can now collect information at will, add it to an index, and retrieve whatever information is currently needed quickly and efficiently.

In my last post we learned the basics of creating and modifying a Lucene Index. Now I’ll give you some tips on how to query your index and avoid some of the pitfalls and stumbling blocks I’ve come across.
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The hardest part in creating a user interface or complex feature is explaining to the user how it should be used. No matter how useful a feature is, if users can not figure out how to use it, it won’t provide them any benefit.

Tutorials and wizards can both help in getting users easily using features for the first time. Tutorials can be good at describing the steps necessary to perform a task where users may want to modify the steps in order to accommodate their specific needs. But tutorials do not typically live within your plugin/product and force users to switch between a tutorial on a website and your product. Wizards are great for taking a user through an ordered series of configuration actions but they also have their weaknesses. Wizards live entirely in a dialog box, which not only has to be designed by the development team, but also does not provide nearly enough flexibility. This is where a little known feature of Eclipse comes to the rescue.

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One of my favorite parts of working at Architexa is that I get the chance to learn and experiment with new and interesting libraries, projects, and tools. One such project is Lucene. It provides a great infrastructure for indexing and searching any sort of text. This can be used for all sorts of applications and has saved us a great deal of time when keeping track of data in our projects.

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Recently, while working on some collaboration functionality for our suite I got a chance to work on a REST (Representational State Transfer) based web server. There are many great resources about REST out there but most of them are quite technical and it took a me a while to get it. So, in this post I am trying to explain in some simple terms what I have understood about REST. read more »

When working with large code bases, finding your way around can sometime get quite challenging. In such cases, Eclipse makes a developer’s life a lot easier with its shortcuts and quick navigation features. Below is a compilation of a few shortcuts that I have found really useful.

Quick Navigation in the Workspace

While working with a large projects one of the challenges we face is to quickly find resources in the workspace. A very useful shortcut to find any kind of Java resource is Ctrl+Shift+T. It opens a dialog box to search for the needed resource and wildcards can be used in cases where you are not sure about the name of the class. Similarly Ctrl+Shift+R can be used to find any type of resource (even non Java) present in the workspace like jsp’s, xml’s etc. read more »

Large projects often come with an independent (usually ant based) build system – so that the project can be built effectively in different situations. For programmers working on these projects, this often means setting up the IDE to work with these build systems. While working with development teams, I have seen way too many examples of the IDE not setup to take advantage of some of their features. Especially these days, IDE’s absolutely rock, so if you are not taking advantage of them then you are likely putting yourself at a disadvantage.

Below are a set of steps that you can follow to configure Eclipse to effectively work on your project:

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I couldn’t make it to The Server Side Symposium this week, so I spent my spare time following the latest happenings on twitter, various blogs, and checking out the uploaded slides. While these are no replacements to talking to the other attendees in person, it is great to see the online world make things easier when we can’t show up in person.

The symposium agenda had four tracks over a period of three days with a number of the slides now available online. Below are some of the highlights from the symposium:

Twitter Updates

Updates from the conference where posted with the #tssjs hashtag and they can be used to get a listing of the play-by-play points as people tweeted them. I pulled out a list of all the tweets and converted them into a tag cloud. Clicking on any of the commonly used words below will show the tweets that those words were posted under.

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