[Xapian-devel] Re: Xapian jni

[Ralf Mattes]

On Thu, 2006-12-28 at 23:46 +0000, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 11:45:09AM -0500, Alex Kushkuley wrote:
> > What do you think about Xapian web service?
> 
> It would probably be useful to have.  I think it would be best to
> implement as a layer on top of Xapian (similarly to how the bindings are
> in many ways).

Hmm, isn't a Webservice provider pretty much an application? I think
Xapian should focus on what it is: a framework to _build_ such
applications. IMHO query frontends are always tightly coupled with the
backend/indexer and that tends to be rather application specific.
Generalizing the framework so much that it'll cover all possible
use-cases will most likely create a bloated monster. Wrapping a
server/xml-generator around an existing indexer/query parser seems like
a rather trivial exercise.
   
> There are actually currently a couple of "web service"-ish features you
> might want to look at:
> 
> * You can use omega's "xml" OmegaScript template to give XML output
>   (with an arbitrary format Sam made up!)  There's also an "opensearch"
>   template which gives XML output in the OpenSearch RSS format.  The
>   reason we have both is that the "xml" template predates the OpenSearch
>   format (and includes some extra information so it seems unhelpful to
>   remove it).
> 
> * There's also Richard's queryserver which you can find in SVN, or in
>   the automatic snapshots:
> 
>   http://www.oligarchy.co.uk/xapian/trunk/
> 
>   It claims to be "0.8.4" because nobody has been bumping the version
>   with each Xapian release.  It used to be in the tinderbox builds but
>   I turned it off as the code hadn't been updated for some time so it
>   seemed a waste of resources to rebuild it so frequently.  But it
>   should build against Xapian 0.9.9.  Currently this only has a PHP
>   client, but the client is only 130 lines of PHP so it would be pretty
>   easy to write clients for other languages.
> 

Yes, but what all these seem to lack is the xml parser for the
request :-)
Iff xml output is all you're after that my shaggy mod-xapian might count
as an implementation as well. It actually only creates xml output that
then can be handled to some xslt-transforming module.

 Cheers, Ralf Mattes

> Cheers,
>     Olly
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xapian-devel mailing list
> Xapian-devel at lists.xapian.org
> http://lists.xapian.org/mailman/listinfo/xapian-devel