On Jun 16, 2010, at 7:31 PM, Mark Diggory wrote:
p.s. I'd be glad to contribute our Maven build re-organization back
to the community to get Solr properly Mavenized so that it can be
distributed and released more often. For us the benefit of this
structure is that we will be able to overlay addons such as
RequestHandlers and other third party support without having to
rebuild Solr from scratch.
But you don't have to rebuild Solr from scratch to add a new request
handler or other plugins - simply compile your custom stuff into a JAR
and put it in <solr-home>/lib (or point to it with <lib> in
solrconfig.xml).
Ideally, a Maven Archetype could be created that would allow one
rapidly produce a Solr webapp and fire it up in Jetty in mere seconds.
How's that any different than cd example; java -jar start.jar? Or do
you mean a Solr client webapp?
Finally, with projects such as Bobo, integration with Spring would
make configuration more consistent and request significantly less
java coding just to add new capabilities everytime someone authors a
new RequestHandler.
It's one line of config to add a new request handler. How many
ridiculously ugly confusing lines of Spring XML would it take?
The biggest thing I learned about Solr in my work thusfar is that
patches like these could be standalone modules in separate projects
if it weren't for having to hack the configuration and solrj methods
up to adopt them. Which brings me to SolrJ, great API if it would
stay generic and have less concern for adding method each time some
custom collections and query support for morelikethis or
collapseddocs needs to be added.
I personally find it silly that we customize SolrJ for all these
request handlers anyway. You get a decent navigable data structure
back from general SolrJ query requests as it is, there's no need to
build in all these convenience methods specific to all the Solr
componetry. Sure, it's "convenient", but it's a maintenance headache
and as you say, not generic.
But hacking configuration is reasonable, I think, for adding in
plugins. I guess you're aiming for some kind of Spring-like auto-
discovery of plugins? Yeah, maybe, but I'm pretty -1 on Spring coming
into Solr. It's overkill and ugly, IMO. But you like it :) And
that's cool by me, to each their own.
Oh, and Hi Mark! :)
Erik
