[Haskell-cafe] Sphinx full-text searching client on Hackage

[Chris Eidhof]

Hey everyone,

We started working on a client [1] for the sphinx full-text search  
engine [2], which is a very fast full-text search engine that has  
either SQL or XML as a backend. While our version is far from done (it  
only supports the query command, and a limited number of parameters),  
we still think that it might be useful for other people as well. If  
you want to help us hacking on it, testing it or improving  
documentation, you're more than welcome.

The communication with Sphinx is done using a quite low-level binary  
protocol, but Data.Binary saved the day: it made it very easy for us  
to parse all the binary things. Especially the use of the Get and Put  
monads are a big improvement over the manual reading and keeping track  
of positions, as is done in the PHP/Python clients.

Thanks,
-chris

[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sphinx
[2]: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/