I have a very similar setup and that's precisely what we do - except
with JSON.
1) Request comes into PHP
2) PHP runs the search against several different cores (in a multicore
setup) - ours are a little more than "slightly" different
3) PHP constructs a new object with the responseHeader and response
objects joined together (basically add the record counts together in
the header and then concatenate the arrays of documents)
4) PHP encodes the combined data into JSON and returns it
It sounds clunky but it all manages to happen very quickly (< 200 ms
round trip). The only problem you might hit is with paging, but from
the way you describe your situation it doesn't sound like that will be
a problem. It's more of an issue if you're trying to make them
seamlessly flow into each other, but it sounds like you plan on
presenting them separately (as we do).
--
Steve
it could be a custom request handler, but it doesn't have to be -- you
could implment it in whatever way is easiest for you (there's no
reason
why it has to run in the same JVM or on the same physical machine as
Solr
... it could be a PHP script on another server if you want)
-Hoss
