Why was the Solidity compiler removed in geth 1.6.0?

Question

Why was the Solidity compiler removed in geth 1.6.0? What is the procedure to deploy a contract in geth 1.6.0?

Answer 1

Here is the discussion where it was decided to deprecate eth_compile.

To summarize, it's not really geth's responsibility to compile code. Or parity's. Or any other node's. Continuing to support in-node compilation would force nodes to host compilers written in other languages. In addition, the interface to compile was poor, as there are many more complexities to a compilation process than a single function call could provide. By removing it, several potential cans of worms were preemptively closed.

How do we go on from here?

A simple method is to use remix, which can connect to a geth node. Alternately, some frameworks have a built-in toolchain. I personally use a home-brewed gulpfile to automate compilation.

If you really need solc in your JS code, a JS version can be found here.