Create an area handler that will show the facets for a given query (for providing a Faceted Search module-like UI)

I would like to emulate the UI of http://www.urbanministry.org/sitemap (which is a view, with the base table of taxonomy term and counts provided by Statistics Pro) and of the Find Grants tab on http://www.urbanministry.org/grants (which is a views-filtered custom Faceted Search environment). See http://groups.drupal.org/node/79954 for a more detailed description of my needs.

Scott Reynolds informed me that this is possible in Views 3 by creating an area handler. This would display the faceted search blocks provided by the Apache Solr module. Then the view could be set to have empty text in the field, or else use $view->build_info['abort'] = TRUE to abort rendering after the area handler has finished rendering.

So this is a task for me to create the requisite area handler.

I think that I will simply invoke the blocks to generate the markup for the area. If that doesn't work, then I will call the functions that generate the markup which is included in the blocks.