[My apologies to Roland for "hijacking" his original thread for this rant!
Look what you started!!]
And I will stand by my statement: "Solr is too much of a beast for average
app developers to master."
And the key word there, in case a too-casual reader missed it is "master" -
not "use" in the sense of hack something together or solving a niche
application for a typical Solr deployment, but master in the sense of having
a high level of confidence about the vast bulk (even if not absolutely 100%)
of the subject matter, Solr itself.
I mean, generally, on average what percentage of Solr's many features has
the average Solr app-deployer actually "mastered"?
And, what I am really referring to is not what expertise the pioneers and
"expert" Solr solution consultants have had, but the level of expertise
required for those who are to come in the years ahead who simply want to
focus on their application without needing to become a "Solr expert" first.
The context of my statement was the application "devs" referenced earlier in
this thread who were struggling because the Solr API was not 100% pure
RESTful. As the respondent indicated, they were much happier to have a
cleaner, more RESTful API that they as app developers can deal with, so that
they wouldn't have to "master" all of the bizarre inconsistencies of Solr
itself (e.g., just the knowledge that SolrCell doesn't support
partial/atomic update.)
And, the real focus of my statement, again in this particular context" is
the actual application devs, the guys focused on the actual application
subject matter itself, not the "Solr Experts" or "Solr solution architects"
who do have a lot higher mastery of Solr than the "average" application
devs.
And if my statement were in fact false, questions such as began this thread
would never have come up. The level of traffic for Solr User would be
essentially zero if it were really true that average application developers
can easily "master" Solr.
And there would be zero need so many of these Solr training classes if Solr
were so easy to "master". In fact, the very existence of so many Solr
training classes effectively proves my point. And that's just for "basic"
Solr, not any of the many esoteric points such as at the heart of this
particular thread (i.e., SolrCell not supporting partial/atomic update.)
And, in conclusion, my real interest is in helping the many "average"
application developers who post inquiries on this Solr user list for the
simple reason that they ARE in fact "struggling" with Solr.
Personally, I would suggest that a typical (average) successful deployer of
Solr would be more readily characterized as having "survived" the Solr
deployment process rather than having achieved a truly deep "mastery" of
Solr. They may have achieved confidence about exactly what they have
deployed, but do they also have great confidence that they know exactly what
will happen if they make slight and subtle changes or what exactly the fix
will be for certain runtime errors? For the "average application developer"
I'm talking about, not the elite expert Solr consultants.
One final way of putting it. If a manager or project leader wanted to staff
a dev position to be "in-house Solr expert", can they just hire any old
average Java programmer with no Solr experience and expect that he will
rapidly "master" Solr?
I mean, why would so many recruiters be looking for a "Solr expert" or
engaging the services of Solr sonsultancies if mastery of Solr by "average
application developers" was a reality?!
[I want to hear Otis' take on this!]
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Ingersoll
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2013 1:47 PM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Adding pdf/word file using JSON/XML
On Jun 15, 2013, at 12:54 PM, Alexandre Rafalovitch <arafa...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org>
wrote:
That being said, it truly amazes me that people were ever able to
implement Solr, given some of the FUD in this thread. I guess those tens
of thousands of deployments out there were all done by above average
devs...
I would not classify the thread as FUD.
I was just referring to the part about how Solr isn't something average devs
can do, which I think is FUD.
At any rate, I think the ExtractingReqHandler could be updated to allow for
metadata, etc. to be passed in with the raw document itself and a patch
would be welcome. It's something the literals stand in for now as a
lightweight proxy, but clearly there is an opportunity for more to be passed
in.=
