Hi all, I only just now discovered this thread on the future of SolrJS. I'm one of the Drupal developers that worked on the SolrJS fork that we call AJAX Solr. The code is up at http://github.com/evolvingweb/AJAX-Solr
Before I address some of the concerns that came up earlier in the thread, I'd just like to thank Matthias and any contributors for their work on SolrJS, which provided an excellent API and framework in which to add more features and improve existing ones. Now: why did we fork SolrJS instead of patching? A fork was preferable for two reasons. (1) we would have had to make a lot of patches and (2) we needed the code to be licensed under GPL in order to publish it on drupal.org, which is the one and only place Drupal developers go to share code. As to (1), it is entirely possible some of our patches would not have been accepted, even though they are useful to us, so it would have probably been inevitable that we start a fork. As we were hacking SolrJS for one of our clients, not for its own right, we also got quite far from the original code, so writing atomic patches would have taken months (we don't work full-time on this). As to (2), AJAX Solr is currently tri-licensed as GPL v2, ASL v2, and MIT. We don't really care about the license. It's GPL v2 for drupal.org, ASL v2 for consistency with SolrJS, and MIT for consistency with Ruby on Rails, for which we hope to one day release a plugin, as we have done for Drupal (the Drupal module will be released this weekend). If it were up to me, I'd just make the code public domain. I'm not religious about licences. We set up the GitHub account so that people could contribute code there, under all three licenses, instead of contributing code at drupal.org (only GPL), or apache.org (only ASL?). I will not accept a patch unless I can release it under those three licenses. I think this will avoid any licensing issues and address the licensing concerns I read earlier in the thread. RE: Shalin Shekhar Mangar: "Are they exposing their Solr servers to the public so that it can be accessed directly through Javascript?" In our Drupal module, we provide the option to either expose the Solr server to the public (not recommended), or to proxy requests through Drupal (recommended) or even a custom proxy. Our Drupal proxy filters the request prepared by the JavaScript, returning only those fields that the administrator set as publicly accessible, and limiting the number of rows returned to the administrator-set maximum. Also, as to the name, a few things: one of our developers, when we were still thinking of patching SolrJS, created a module on drupal.org called "solrjs". As we won't be using SolrJS, we will rename that appropriately. If anyone objects to the name "AJAX Solr" please let me know. I don't think it's a problem to have "Solr" in the name; it would be terribly confusing if it didn't. Thanks, James P.S.: Since I just joined the list, I didn't know how to reply to the thread with all the thread history attached. Sorry if this causes problems with the mailing list.
