[Xapian-discuss] Future of Xapian (long)

[Sam Liddicott]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Boulton" <richard@lemurconsulting.com>
To: <xapian-discuss@lists.xapian.org>
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2004 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: [Xapian-discuss] Future of Xapian (long)


> I should rephrase this: "An application server providing an interface to
> Xapian over HTTP".  (This would probably also use XML to format the
> returned data.) The idea of this is that it allows a web application
> developer to talk to a Xapian system, possibly running on a remote
> machine, using a standard protocol which is supported in many languages.
>   The idea is certainly not that the Xapian webserver would be exposed
> directly to the public internet.
>
> The idea comes in part from observing that a lot of commercial search
> engines provide this type of interface.  It would allow easy integration
> of Xapian into a servlet architecture - also popular in (parts of) the
> commercial world.  It would also allow, for example, a PHP developer to
> access a remote Xapian server without requiring a customised PHP
> installation.
>
> Why use HTTP for this?  Mainly because many languages now have support
> for HTTP built in, so integration is extremely easy.

It was this realisation that gave birth to the xml query template and caused
me to stop work on swig-php and the php bindings.
In fairness the php bindings were resulting in omega being re-written in php
which wasn't really very sensible and the xml template results turns out to
be a lot more useful.

SOAP is a red herring here, I'm pretty sure, it's easy enough to request a
straight URL.

Sam