Hi all,
I'm excited to see that Max has made a lot of great progress in adding Solr support to the GeoData extension so that we don't have to use mysql for spatial search - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/27610/
GeoData makes use of the Solarium php client, which is currently included as a part of the extension. GeoData will be our second use of Solar, after TranslationMemory extension which is already deployed - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Translation_memories... the Wikidata team is working on using Solr in their extensions as well.
TranslationMemory also uses Solarium, a copy of which is also bundled with and loaded from the extension. For a loading and config example - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/mediawiki-config.git;a=bl...
I think Solr is the right direction for us to go in. Current efforts can pave the way for a complete refresh of WMF's article full text search as well as how our developers approach information retrieval. We just need to make sure that these efforts are unified, with commonality around the client api, configuration, indexing (preferably with updates asynchronously pushed to Solr in near real-time), and schema definition. This is important from an operational aspect as well, where it would be ideal to have a single distributed and redundant cluster.
It would be great to see the i18n, mobile tech, wikidata, and any other interested parties collaborate and agree on a path forward, with a quick sprint around common code that all can use.
-Asher