Just wanted to chime in on the technical set-up of the Solr "petting zoo",
I think I can help here; just let me know what you need.
Here is the idea; just have a vagrant box with ansible provisioning Zoo
keepers and Solr, creating collections, and etc.... That way anyone
starting out can just clone the repo, 'vagrant up' and have a fully
functional environment in no time. Setting up Solr is not the hard part and
I think it takes a little something from the experience, but if it would
help someone get started. Just send me an e-mail off line and let me know.
I do some work on an open source Solr python library and I use a similar
instance to run through unit tests on supported versions of python with
some of the latest versions of Solr; it works great and most of the work is
already done.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Shawn Heisey <apa...@elyograg.org> wrote:
> On 9/15/2016 8:24 AM, Alexandre Rafalovitch wrote:
> > The WIKI may be an official community-contributing forum, but its
> > technological implementation has gotten so bad it is impossible to
> > update. Every time I change the page, it takes minutes (and feels like
> > hours) for the update to come through. No clue what to do about that
> > though.
>
> Interestingly, even though it takes several minutes for the change
> request to finish, the wiki actually updates almost immediately after
> pushing the button. The page load (and the resulting email to the
> mailing list) just takes forever. I discovered this by looking at the
> page in another tab while waiting for the page load to get done.
>
> As I understand it, MoinMoin is entirely filesystem-based, a typical
> config doesn't use a database. Apache has a LOT of MoinMoin installs
> running on wiki.apache.org. I think the performance woes are a case of
> a technology that's not scalable enough for how it's being used.
>
> > I feel that it would be cool to have a live tutorial. Perhaps a
> > special collection that, when bootstrapped from, provides tutorial,
> > supporting data, smart interface to play with that data against that
> > same instance, etc. It could also have a static read-only export, but
> > the default experience should be interactive ("bin/solr start -e
> > tutorial" or even "bin/solr start -e
> > http://www.example.com/tutorial";....).
>
> That is an interesting idea. I can envision a tutorial example, a
> canned source directory for indexing data into it, and a third volume of
> documentation, specifically for learning with that index. It could
> include a section on changing the schema, reindexing, and seeing how
> those changes affect indexing and queries.
>
> > And it should be something that very strongly focuses on teaching new
> > users to fish, not just use the variety of seafood Solr comes with. A
> > narrative showing how different parts of Solr come together and how to
> > troubleshoot those, as opposed to taking each element (e.g. Query
> > Parser) individually and covering them super-comprehensively. That
> > last one is perfect in the reference guide, but less than friendly to
> > a beginner.
>
> Yes, yes, yes.
>
> Thanks,
> Shawn
>
>
