In shipping software I spoke briefly about me.edu.au (which is still taking a good amount of my time). Recently, though I’ve been spending a lot of time preparing education.au’s Java based federated search product (the Distributed Search Manager – OpenDSM) for release as an open source product. That’s been an interesting experience – the code is pretty old, and was glued together using static references. I had to pull it part, replace the static references with factories (changing to dependency injection wasn’t realistic for this release at least) and put it back together. It’s kind of odd working on a project like that – the code almost causes me pain at times, but with a product that is stable and reliable I don’t want to make too many changes just because I don’t like the style.

Some readers of this blog may be interested in it, because it allows federating of results from multiple Solr servers (or OpenSearch services) together into a single result set. That’s useful in quite a large set of places.

It’s also the first time I’ve been paid to create open source code as an explicit goal – most of my open source work has been for pragmatic reasons, not as a goal in itself.