[Xapian-devel] Re: Xapian jni

James Aylett james-xapian at tartarus.org
Fri Dec 29 16:14:36 GMT 2006


On Fri, Dec 29, 2006 at 04:09:13AM +0100, Ralf Mattes wrote:

> > > Yes, but what all these seem to lack is the xml parser for the
> > > request :-)
> > 
> > I did describe them as `"web service"-ish'!
> 
> Ah, cool trick. I have to try that on my customers some time ;-)
> Seriously, request parsing is probably the most tricky part of
> webservices - and unfortunately most web service libraries i know of
> will send xml. Anyone who's written som WebDAV client (or, shudder,
> server) will know what nightmare xml protocols can be -- not because of
> xml per se, but because of what half-knowledgeable programmers can make
> out of it.

As a purist, I'd just like to point out that "Web Services" do *not*
require XML input. You can use SOAP Document Literal, and WSDL has a
mode for describing REST-like query interfaces. This tends to give a
better quality API, at more cost to implement - but similar cost to
use, since (a) if you get the WSDL, XML Schema and so forth in place
you can to an extent just use client libraries; (b) it's a lot easier
to understand for most people.

It wouldn't take much work to write, say, a Java business object for
searching and then extend that out over SOAP using AXIS. But the point
(that everyone has made, so I feel I should too :-) is that this isn't
Xapian's job. Unless we write a SOAP wrapper round the *whole* of the
Xapian API (which we could, but let's not), any web service API is
going to take decisions about what's important and what isn't, so it's
much more application-specific.

Ages ago we had an XML-driven system for indexing, which never worked
terribly well (mostly because it's slow, and an inconvenient way of
representing the problem). Trying to use web services in place of a
Java wrapper for Xapian (as someone suggested), while it would produce
a working system probably wouldn't be all that practical for most
people on efficiency grounds. (I'm almost inclined to suggest that for
folks who have difficulty installing JNI bits, we should roll over and
let Lucene win.)

J

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org



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