SolrJ with Maven - maven

Question

I am a newbie in Solr and maven and i want to make a small application that index all my database tables via SolrJ .
For that i looked up at this tutorial where they are using MAVEN .
I installed the librairies and jars (except maven) but i had this exception:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/http/HttpRequestInterceptor
I looked into the tutorial and i saw that for resolving this problem we need to add this to my maven configuration:
org.slf4j
slf4j-simple
1.5.6
Is there anyway to do that without maven?
Thank you

Answer 1

Use maven. Even with it, it took me a fairly considerable amount of time to get the dependencies right. The tutorials were all a bit lacking. Below is my pom.xml with the relevant dependencies that I had maven bring in. Perhaps it will help you.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.solr</groupId>
<artifactId>solr-core</artifactId>
<version>4.3.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<artifactId>solr-solrj</artifactId>
<groupId>org.apache.solr</groupId>
<version>4.3.0</version>
<type>jar</type>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
<version>1.1.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
<artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
<version>2.5</version>
</dependency>

Answer 2

Maven is the suggested build technology for the Solrj, because it automates the management of 3rd party dependencies. Without dependency management it's a royal pain to decipher these relationships (Jar hell).
What I could suggest is to use ivy, which has a command-line mode.
First download the ivy jar
http://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=org/apache/ivy/ivy/2.3.0/ivy-2.3.0.jar
To retrieve the following Maven module and all it's dependencies:
<dependency>
<artifactId>solr-solrj</artifactId>
<groupId>org.apache.solr</groupId>
<version>1.4.0</version>
<type>jar</type>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
Then run it as follows:
java -jar ivy.jar \
-dependency org.apache.solr solr-solrj 1.4.0 \
-retrieve "lib/[artifact]-[revision](-[classifier]).[ext]" \
-confs default
Retrieves into the lib directory:
lib/commons-httpclient-3.1.jar
lib/wstx-asl-3.2.7.jar
lib/slf4j-api-1.5.5.jar
lib/commons-codec-1.3.jar
lib/stax-api-1.0.1.jar
lib/geronimo-stax-api_1.0_spec-1.0.1.jar
lib/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar
lib/solr-solrj-1.4.0.jar
lib/commons-io-1.4.jar
lib/commons-fileupload-1.2.1.jar
Update
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/http/HttpRequestInterceptor
This is due to a missing httpcore.jar file. I found this out by browsing Maven Central:
http://search.maven.org/#search|ga|1|fc%3A%22org.apache.http.HttpRequestInterceptor%22
The recommendation on using the "slf4j-simple" is to provide a logging implementation in case your application doesn't have one.
Finally... This demonstrates what I've tried to say. In the absence of a dependency management tool (ivy, groovy, Maven) you're on your own in deciphering the 3rd party jar dependencies.