[Blacklight-development] UVA Blacklight and Flare update

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Awesome, thanks for the update. I'm still a bit confused about the
relationship between Blacklight and Flare. If I svn up my Blacklight
stuff, will I get the new Flare stuff too (perhaps through svn
externals), or do I need to do something else to install the new Flare
stuff?  Or is blacklight still using it's own seperate code and not the
actual trunk Flare?

Jonathan

Matt Mitchell wrote:
> 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
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blacklight-development mailing list
> Blacklight-development at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/blacklight-development
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu