There is a C++ library API for accessing Hypertable. The best way to get introduced to it is to look at the Apache Log example. You can find it in the examples/apache_log directory in the source tarball. Be sure to pull the latest source from the git repository (see
http://code.google.com/p/hypertable/wiki/SourceCode?tm=4) because the API has been cleaned up considerably since the
0.9.0.4 release.
As far as a socket API goes, there currently is no plan for one. However, we're planning to have a Thrift broker which will listen on a socket and speak the Thrift protocol. This will provide many popular language bindings.
- Doug