Lucene conference in May

This year there is no ApacheCon Europe, but a number of more focused events related to projects at Apache and elsewhere are showing up to fill the space.

The first one is Apache Lucene EuroCon, a dedicated Lucene and Solr user conference on 18-21 May in Prague. That's the place to be if you're in Europe and interested in Lucene-based search technology (or want to stop by for the beer festival). I'll be there presenting Apache Tika, and the abstract of my presentation is:

Apache Tika is a toolkit for extracting text and metadata from digital documents. It's the perfect companion to search engines and any other applications where it's useful to know more than just the name and size of a file. Powered by parser libraries like Apache POI and PDFBox, Tika offers a simple and unified way to access content in dozens of document formats.

This presentation introduces Apache Tika and shows how it's being used in projects like Apache Solr and Apache Jackrabbit. You will learn how to integrate Tika with your application and how to configure and extend Tika to best suit your needs. The presentation also summarizes the key characteristics of the more widely used file formats and metadata standards, and shows how Tika can help deal with that complexity.

The rest of the conference program is also now available. See you there!

"SIMPLE".toLowerCase() is simple, right?

It turns out that "SIMPLE".toLowerCase().equals("simple") is not true if your default locale is Turkish, but your code is written in English. Turkish has two "i" characters, one with a dot and one without, which throws the above code off balance. The fix is to write the expression either as "SIMPLE".toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH).equals("simple") or even better as "SIMPLE".equalsIgnoreCase("simple").

I just stumbled on this issue with Apache Tika (see TIKA-404), and it seems like I'm not the only one.