LibraryFind 0.8.5.8 next week

As I’ve been working on 0.9, I’ve been trying to migrate few odds and ends into the current 0.8 branch so that I can move them into production faster on our end.  To that end, I’ll be posting an updated to LF by the beginning of next week.  These updates will include:

1. Update to the Harvester (this will make it a bit more fault tolerant) as well as allowing harvesting of sets (currently) and root level oai providers (not provided currently).  This change required significant changes to the search component as well that deals with the harvested materials.
2. Auto-detection of namespaces (for oai and sru — needed for libxml)
3. Removed rexml dependencies for opensearch component
4. Frozen gems for oai, sru and opensearch into vendor directories (and have added that to the environment.rb file)
5. Prep code for solr/ferret decision.  I’ll be adding support to use either ferret or solr as your backend indexer for harvesting for 0.9, but some changes are being made to make this easier.  Ferret provides an integrated rails solutions, while solr would provide a hosted index option.
6. In addition to this, some changes to the libxml module have deprecated a call being used in the oai gem (maybe the sru gem).  I’ll take a look at both this week and update appropriately [as well as keep backworks compatibility if possible]

Something else, we are starting to work with mod_rails.  This allows apache to manage the rails environment — eliminating the need to run rails through packs of mongrels (or other specialized serving mechanism).  I’ll write up something on our experiences for others that might be interested in this approach.

–TR