Hello, I am considering to implement a recommendation engine for a small size website. The website will employ LAMP stack, and for some reasons the recommendation engine must be written in C++. It consists of an On-line Component and Off-line Component, both need to connect to MySQL. The difference is that On-line Component will need a connection pool, whereas several persistent connections or even connect as required would be sufficient for the Off-line Component, since it does not require real time performance in a concurrent requests scenario as in On-line Component.
On-line Component is to be wrapped as a web service via Apache AXIS2. The PHP frontend app on Apache http server retrieves recommendation data from this web service module. There are two DB connection options for On-line Component I can think of: 1. Use ODBC connection pool, I think unixODBC might be a candidate. 2. Use connection pool APIs that come as a part of Apache HTTP server. mod_dbd would be a choice.http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_dbd.html As for Off-line Component, a simple DB connection option is direct connection using ODBC. Due to lack of web app design experience, I have the following questions: Option 1 for On-line Component is a tightly coupled design without taking advantage of pooling APIs in Apache HTTP server. But if I choose Option 2 (3-tiered architecture), as a standalone component apart from Apache HTTP server, how to use its connection pool APIs? A Java application can be deployed as a WAR file and contained in a servlet container such as tomcat(See Mahout in Action, section 5.5), or it can use org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.impl.model.jdbc.ConnectionPoolDataSource ( https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommender+Documentation). Is there any similar approach for my C++ recommendation engine? I am not sure if I made a proper prototype. Any suggestions will be appreciated:) Thanks, Mike
