Expecting binary client support, not only in the language of your choice but packaged in the extension mode of your choice seems a little much... Is riak over http really a big problem for you?
Hmm, memcached has it. Redis has it. If you want your product to be used seriously by the PHP community, that is the only way to go. Native PHP + HTTP is just not an option. HTTP is a horrible transport for speed. Especially when implemented using cURL libs in PHP code. I need sub-millisecond connect times and would prefer persistent connections. Riak over HTTP does not give me either. I know the cURL overhead. Its 2ms just for making the objects and creating the connections.
Have a look at this benchmark done by Gaia Online using different options. http://lists.basho.com/pipermail/riak-users_lists.basho.com/2011-December/006957.html
Luckily, there appears to be someone working on PHP+Protobuf+Riak in at least a partially compiled way by having the Protobuf stuff compiled as C. If we decide to try Riak, I will join that development effort.
Brian.
