[Xapian-discuss] Future of Xapian (long)

[James Aylett]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 10:56:42PM +0100, Sam Liddicott wrote:

> > 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.

It still suffers from having to invoke omega by CGI on every request
(or at the least to fork-exec somewhere). Having a proper app server
with Xapian embedded would be an even bigger win.

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

To an app server this might be true. You have to agree on your
encoding of non-ASCII characters, but there's no length
restriction. Or you could use POST, which unfortunately has
the wrong semantics, but will be abused in this way by HTTP app
servers forever.

J

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james@tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org