The Ibuildings techPortal ha sposted their latest episode in the DPC Radio podcast series - recordings of sessions from the Dutch PHP Conference earlier this year. This episode is a recording of a talk from Paul Matthews about "Searching with Solr".

With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn't always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we'll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. The slides for the presentation can be found here on SlideShare.

New on DZone.com today there's an article from Bas De Nooijer talking about a new tool he's created to allow PHP to work directly with Solr (the popular searching platform from the Apache project) as a result of research he'd done from a previous article. The result is < href="https://github.com/basdenooijer/solarium">Solarium, an open sourced PHP client for Solr.

I've worked on a lot of Solr implementations in PHP applications. There are multiple solutions: manual HTTP requests, the solr-php-client library, custom implementations etcetera. However they all have one issue in common: they only handle the communication with Solr, many other important parts like query building are not covered at all. And the parts that are covered are usually over-simplified. [...] At first I developed it as a library for my own projects, but I've decided to turn it into an opensource project. The project is called 'Solarium' and can be found on github: https://github.com/basdenooijer/solarium

You can find complete details about the project over on its wiki including basics concepts of query flow and using the ping/select/update query methods to access your Solr server.

In some of his recent work Lukas Smith has been testing the waters of what Solr (the fast, open source search platform) has to offer. In his work with it he needed a way to convert the queries that come in from users into something Solr can understand. In this new post he explains how and shares the code for his solution (symfony-based).

In this blog post I want to talk about a prototype class I threw together (Look ma', I'm using git!) by working ezcSearch to help me in parsing and transforming end user queries into complex Solr queries.

He includes a few examples of Solr queries and what sort of data they'd return as well as the source for the library he's created to extend the sfSolrPlugin translate something coming in from a form into a simple Solr-formatted query.

Matt Williams has a quick post to his blog about using the combination of PHP and Apache's Solr to more powerful searching than something like a MySQL fulltext index can give you.

When data sets get large and MySQL database querying to search become too load heavy and slow, full indexing is required. Several solutions are available but in this article I will be demonstrating the Apache foundations Solr Java Lucene implementation. For this a Java build will be required. Linux or Mac is less of a problem but for windows I use the Apache Tomcat server.

He shows ho to use the Solr PHP interface to make the connection to the server, ping it to be sure the connection is working and, based on the schema and search information, return a set of results in a PHP object.

As announced on the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new version of the extension for PHP that lets it interface directly with a Solr instance.

The Apache Solr extension is an extremely fast, light-weight, feature-rich library that allows PHP developers to communicate easily and efficiently with Apache Solr server instances using an object-oriented API. It effectively simplifies the process of interacting with Apache Solr using PHP. The Solr extension already has built-in readiness for Solr 1.4

The post lists some of the features of the API the extension exposes (like connection reuse and a simpler interface to response data) as well as a list of supported components.

In a recent blog entry about a fulltext searching solution, Markus Wolff hacked together in a few hours with Zend_Search_Lucene:

While working at some really old code that provided a fulltext search feature, I was at one point incredibly pissed rather unsatisfied due to the fact that said code resisted all attempts to debug it. This lead to the decision to sit down on a rainy weekend to try if I couldn't come up with something more useful, and most importantly, scalable.

His method allowed for separation between the indexing and the main app and how he changes some of his methods when he learned that Solr did something very similar. He also lays out some example XML content and how it's handled in his script (via a SimpleXML object).

A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:

Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.

On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").

You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.