On Jul 10, 2008, at 7:37 PM, Lars Kotthoff wrote:
How about getting the user interface I wrote in with the release? I
think it'd
make a nice addition as something that's directly visible to the end-
user.
I'd prefer not rushing that in, as it is a big contribution and needs
a bit more review. (personally I think Spring MVC is overkill and
less flexible, more verbose, than alternatives, but I'm strongly
opinionated and will defer to others that desire this UI in Solr's
codebase). I am quite impressed with the extensive manual that you
wrote, and your example has gotten me looking into FreeMarker a bit
deeper. Your hierarchical facet feature is interesting. And it made
me smile to see the Ruby wikipedia loading code :) (look at solr-
ruby's HpricotMapper, which may be useful to simplify it some)
SOLR-620 is also the start of a built-in Solr UI framework, but I'm
not going to rush that into 1.3.
There is also Solr Flare, a Ruby on Rails Solr UI, which is already
part of the Solr codebase that is a facet browsing, AJAX auto-
suggesting interface. A great example of it is online here: <http://www.rondhuit-demo.com/yademo/
>. So folks aren't without at least a built-in alternative (albeit
Ruby, so more involved to trying it out with the example app - though
eventually this could be packaged as a .war using JRuby and dropped
into the example webapps directory).
Feedback: I noticed an error when just pressing the "Search" button on
your demo without putting in a query. You'll probably want to default
to a *:* query. And it'd also be cool to see facet values displayed
_before_ doing a "search" so a user can browse without having to do a
full-text search.
Procedure-wise, most patches, including large ones like the
DataImportHandler, are submitted via JIRA and assigned to the ASF,
allowing folks one spot to download and comment on them. I consider
that the first step to your push to get this in. Wiring your
contribution in to the example area would ensure an easy way for folks
to try it out.
Erik
