If you had asked me three weeks ago how one might go about creating a federated search interface that could intelligently combine the results from academic and public libraries, I would have shrugged. If you had then asked how one might go about integrating search results from other sources, such as online journal indexes, weblogs, Amazon.com and Google I might have laughed. But if you had waited another week and asked I would have pointed you to this.
Filler
So I’ve been pretty slack about posting dev stuff as of late. I can blame most of my silence on being busy writing code, but I won’t have that excuse pretty soon. With any luck we’ll be able to slow down a bit after July (watch for the alpha release!) and I’ll get to do some brain dumping here.
The birth of OpenSRF
After months of work, buckets of sweat, and one snapshot of code seemingly unrelated to libraries, we are proud to present our first subproject: OpenSRF (Open Scalable Request Framework), pronounced “open surf”. The 0.1 release of OpenSRF represents the culmination of everything we have posted about here, and some things we haven’t.
One of the main differences between our initial snapshot tarball and the shiny new OpenSRF code is the removal of the dependence on an Auth Application. We have decided that the security provided by Jabber is sufficient for connection to the OpenSRF network, and application level authentication and authorization should be handled either by each individual Application, or by an Authentication Application built specifically for the target problem domain.