[Catalyst] Working a Solr Model -- Follow Up

[John Karr]

After trying to work with Apache::Solr and running into a brick wall 
there, I went back to WebService::Solr and reread the documentation and 
looked at the source code and decided to give it another try and start 
over.

This time it worked, and I was able to return a 
WebServer::Solr::Response object and pass it to the view. Comparing my 
failed experiment with the working one I figured out what caused the 
Unicode errors. I was even able to propose a patch to implement a minor 
feature request that was sitting in the rt.cpan queue.

Summary of the 3 modules I looked at for implementing a Solr Model.

Rejected: Apache::Solr
Returned a resultset that didn't work in Template::Toolkit, had write 
ugly code to convert to array of hashrefs.
I could not figure out how to use a filter query (they are absolutely 
required for how I intend to use Solr).

Rejected: SolrBeam
Must download from GitHub instead of CPAN.
Despite the oddness of feeling like I was reading Ruby I was able to do 
some debugging in the module, but still didn't get it to work.

Selected: WebService::Solr
You must read all of the submodule documentation, everything I needed to 
figure out was somewhere in the documentation, but often not in the main 
module's documentation.
Has its' own Model Adaptor, but it also works if you just extend 
Catalyst::Model.
The code itself was comprehensible and I was able to logically trace a 
request through it, and also to submit a very minor feature patch.
Implements the features I've tried to use so far.

I plan to write a how-to, which I'll post on my blog, if there is going 
to be an Advent Calendar this year, let me know who is collecting 
submissions for it and I'll submit the article in POD.