IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition

Hey you! Need a PHP Search Application?

The great thing about a REST API like IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition's is that it is both development language and platform neutral. The bad thing about a REST API like OmniFind Yahoo! Edition's is that it is development language and platform neutral. Using a REST API is not like using an API that is "native" to a particular language. Someone will surely develop a language that uses REST as the native method calls (or maybe it's been done, leave me a comment if you know), but until that time we all use things like JSPs, PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails for web development.

We know that many of you are using PHP to build your search applications, and it's not as easy as it would be with a "PHP native API". An ad-hoc team of OmniFind developers, Bruce Tannenbaum and Louis Gates, and Visual Designer Robert Lee have come together to provide some relief in the form of a sample application and a set of PHP functions that should make developing PHP search applications much simpler.

Besides being a useful head start for PHP development, some users wanting to provide web site search (as opposed to intranet search) have struggled with how to have their web server in the firewall DMZ but their OmniFind Yahoo! Edition server behind the firewall. This requires having a search application that uses the REST API for remotely invoking OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. This sample application is probably the fastest way to get going with a REST API-based remote search application.

You can get the sample and detailed usage instructions from the entry in the forum. You can leave a comment here or in the forum with how it works for you. Enjoy!