Solr is a standalone webservice application that can be installed on any servlet container like tomcat, jetty etc.  It uses the popular Lucene java library to provide enterprise level search results from databases, filesystem, web services etc.    Solr runs as a web service, so in effect it provides a cross platform search engine.  The results can be accessed from php, java, RoR or .NET by invoking its web service.  The only requirement on your server is that it should allow you to run java application or have deploy solr as a webapp in an existing servlet container such as tomcat or jetty.

This article shows how to get Solr index and provide search results for a simple MySQL table.  The search results will be provided in XML, so you can get your web application to read the results, parse it and display it any form desired. (more…)