I was traveling, and most of my ongoing work is back on my desktop, so I entertained myself on a flight by fiddling with an idea that's been rattling around in the back of my head. It seems like it might be neat to have a websocket interface to solr, but we definitely don't need it to live in the main code base since most folks will not use it, so a module seemed appropriate.
However, I had to do a bit of work to allow a module to start up a socket, since the current infrastructure (as far as I could tell) only adds to the classpath. (Possibly I missed something, feel free to point it out) Although one *could* add an element to solr.xml to start it, it seems pointless to force the user to declare the module AND edit a config file to do the thing they will always have to do (start a web server socket) if they intend to use the module. So I added a module lifecycle, and hacked in the netty websocket example enough that it starts and stops gracefully and answers every request with either "parse error" or "not yet implemented" etc... Not sure how much or how often I'll get to fiddle with this, but if it sounds interesting to, you can read it and comment on it here: https://github.com/apache/solr/pull/2759 -- http://www.needhamsoftware.com (work) https://a.co/d/b2sZLD9 (my fantasy fiction book)
