I’ve worked on a lot of Solr implementations in PHP applications. There are multiple solutions: manual HTTP requests, the solr-php-client library, custom implementations etcetera. However they all have one issue in common: they only handle the communication with Solr, many other important parts like query building are not covered at all. And the parts that are covered are usually over-simplified.

In my previous post Integrating Solr with PHP I did a comparison of several of the available options. Since then I’ve done more research and started to make notes of all issues I came across and all features I missed. Based on these notes I’ve started a project that tries to accurately model Solr and go one step beyond the existing solutions.

This process has taken several months, with lots of refactoring to reach what I think is the optimal model. At first I developed it as a library for my own projects, but I’ve decided to turn it into an opensource project. The project is called ‘Solarium’ and can be found on github: https://github.com/basdenooijer/solarium

Please see the GitHub project wiki for more info about Solarium, the current status and some examples.
I think the Solarium library in it’s current state is already very useful, but lot’s of great features are upcoming. I will regularly post updates.