Last Monday (26th of march) I went to Barcelona to do my thesis defense in order to complete my Master. This defense existed out of a panel of three professors from the UPC university.

Super Solr Mario

I worked hard for the Drupal community to improve the Apache Solr Module for Drupal 7 and hopefully we (Acquia and I) succeeded in our efforts to do so. Naturally not everything could be done in the period of 5 months but here’s a small road map of issues that needed to be resolved.

  • Improve Apache Solr for Drupal 7 and fix all blockers and reduce issue queue
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  • Bring Facet Api for Drupal 7 to a stable Release Candidate.
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  • Update the Acquia Search service to the latest stable Apache Solr version. Upgrade the custom java code that was written to be able to authenticate customers.
  • Backport to a new Drupal 6 branch all the new features that have been programmed into the Drupal 7 version of the Apache Solr Search Integration Module. This includes the backporting of the multisite module.
  • Achieve mastery of the agile/scrum process, the open source software engineering methods, and the team communication processes used by Acquia.
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  • Empower the community to use the Apache Solr Search Integration project by means of Presentations, Blog posts and other interactions with community members.
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  • Create a multisite module to search between 2 or more Drupal sites or integrate this into the existing modules.

Most, if not all, were completed and to give you a small insight what was done I created a small timeline with clickable events (careful: horrible design).

Also, for those that are interested, you can view my master thesis presentation online. I should warn you that it is best viewed on Safari on OSX since Chrome seems to be slow with this. It has been made with jmpress.js and it is an Open Source variant on Prezi and it is just wonderful to work with since it is just a jQuery plugin + HTML and CSS3. At least is does not contain Flash except for the youtube video at the beginning. Those videos were intended to keep the audience interested while waiting ;-)

And if you are really into this topic you can read the complete Master Thesis that is attached to this blog post and the source can be found on https://github.com/nickveenhof/msc_solr_drupal. The thesis paper was created with LaTeX so hopefully people can use some of the nifty tricks I had to use in order to create a cohesive paper.

So, after all of this I’m happy to announce that I graduated successfully with a grade of excellence (9/10) and obtained the title of Master in Information Technology. The only remarks that were given on the complete work was that there is not enough high-quality software engineering diagrams and documentation in the work to fully comprehend how the architecture of the Apache Solr Module works. This is a point of improvement and I’d like to invite everyone to help me, and thus the whole community, to create those.

Thanks Acquia for their support in those 5 months and their support for the Apache Solr Module and Drupal long before that! I will continue to work for Acquia and I will continue to spend time on Drupal and Search.

I’d be more than happy to present this knowledge or a subset of it in a Drupal Camp or any other conference. So if you think it would be of interest, don’t hesitate to contact me