[Xapian-discuss] Future of Xapian (long)

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 12:30:49PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:
> 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. 

Twisted may be worth a look - it provides an HTTP server and lots of
other useful related goodies, and is built on python, for which Xapian
of course has bindings:

http://www.twistedmatrix.com/products/twisted

I've not used it myself - I came across it via buildbot which fills
a similar role to tinderbox, but seems rather slicker.  I'm going to
look at migrating the Xapian tinderbox to buildbot at some point.

> The idea comes in part from observing that a lot of commercial search 
> engines provide this type of interface.

It does hide Xapian's flexible API though, which is one of its
strengths.  If you just want to slot search results into a page, calling
omega with an XML template works pretty well.  If you want to use Xapian
in more advanced ways, it's going to feel cumbersome to work over HTTP
unless there's a lot of glue code at the local end, which then needs to
be ported to every language you want to support...

Cheers,
    Olly