Hello - I am completely new to the Solr development list, I have been using Solr for about a year now - So, first - Thank you everyone for the great set of libraries!
I did previously search the list but didn't find anything discussing this question in detail. I'll keep it brief and to the point. Is there any interest in a Solr binary server-daemon in addition to it's HTTP interface/daemon? A generalized specification would have to be written that would listen on an alternative port from the HTTP interface. This binary interface would accept binary streams instead of 'strings'. A language-specific client driver would have to be written to support this specification. (my interest is in writing a PHP Pecl extension to implement the server interface/specification) If there is any interest or development going on in this area - I am interested in connecting with the other developers and working on a specification/implementation. Now that SOLR and Lucene development is combining I'm not sure how this would change implementation details. I realize the HTTP interface is 'at the heart' of SOLR, but I think the benefits of language-specific drivers would be worthwhile. Reason1: The time taken to establish an HTTP connection, the overhead of the protocol, and the time taken to parse string results is often greater than the time taken to 'perform' the query itself. Reason 2: When returning a 'single node' serialized structure it is not possible to 'scan' the result without at some point in time storing the entire string representation of the result, and the entire data-structure in memory, thus duplicating the minimum required resources. Reason 3: If the client generates a set of binary-tokens no string-lexing has to occur on the server-side. Reason 4: If client tokens are generated from an OOP/Procedural interface, Injection (like SQL injection) is all but impossible. Reason 5: With a binary driver native code interactions with result-sets like "foreach", "for var in list", etc are possible, without any need to parse or unmarshal/unserialize the result. 10gen has implemented all binary Object-Oriented client drivers for Python, Php, Ruby, Perl, and Java for their Document database 'MongoDB' - and these benefits are very clear in the use of their product and the speed of the driver. Thanks for your time!
