[Blacklight-development] UVA Blacklight and Flare update

[Matt Mitchell]

I just deployed another version of UVA Blacklight as well as a hefty update
to Flare.

Flare: http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/svn/rails-plugins/flare/trunk/
A lot of the library has been simplified. Some classes and modules merged
into a singe file.
In the last release, "text filter" meant "query" (like in the Solr world).
"facet filter" was actually a "filter query", using *_facet fields. These
have changed to "query" and "filter", respectively.
The url param name "ff" (facet filter) has changed to just "f" (filter).
The url param name "tf" (text filter) has changed to "q" (query).
The url param for filter fields now require the full field name. For example
in the last release, a facet filter for "composition_era_facet" would be
"composition_era". It now needs to be the full "composition_era_facet". This
allows Flare to build query filters on any field. Not just *_facet fields.
Pagination of facet values now working!
There are a few new tests

UVA Blacklight:
http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/uva_lib/trunk/rails/
The search query handlers are all using Dismax. Each UI tab (catalog, music
and semester at sea) has it's own Solr request handler with boosting on the
title_text field. We'll tweak this according to usability/user requirements.
The Z3950 availability requests are now "on click" driven.
The glob of code that was in the Z3950 controller has been extracted into a
neat little class
Fielded searches are working! These are actually filter queries, not "q"
queries.
The RSS result sets are ordered by a Solr auto generated timestamp field
We've switched from Mongrel Cluster to Thin:
http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/ - just experimenting
Now using a very recent "nightly build" of Solr

I've had thoughts of turning Flare into a framework agnostic gem library.
Wrappers for the url generation helpers would be the hardest part. Wouldn't
it be cool to have Flare running in Merb: http://merbivore.com, or Camping:
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/camping - any thoughts on this?

Matt
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