Evergreen ILS
Open Source Library Software
I’ve been particularly productive today, at least as far as externally visible services are concerned. SuperCat is proving to be a mighty beast, and is now the basis of three (count ’em, three) shiny new web APIs.
UPDATE: Bill and I set up the services described here on our externally accessible dev server. The URLs in the body have been updated to links that point at that server.
I mentioned in a previous post that we were planning to create a script to extract API documentation from our new OpenSRF method signature layout. Well, I was inspired by Aaron Krowne, and found guidance in Thom Hickey, to create an XSLT wrapper to the existing OpenSRF introspection API using the OpenILS XML Gateway.
It’s still only available for use on my development server, but it’s in cvs for all to see, or you can click on the unreadably tiny image at the top left of this post for a screenshot. It’s a (some would say scary) mix of XSLT and Apache SSI, but it’s fast and does what we need. It is currently based, as I mentioned, on the OpenILS XML Gateway, so it’s not really part of OpenSRF proper. I plan to remedy that shortly by pulling the OpenILS specific parts of the XML Gateway out into their own library, and creating a generic OpenSRF XML Gateway.
If anyone out there with free time, a love of XSLT and a desire to help out with OpenSRF or OpenILS/Evergreen would like to poke at it, be my guest. Be forewarned, though; if you are experienced with XSLT (which I most certainly am not) it may make your eyes bleed.
UPDATE: For those interested, I asked Bill to push the docgen XSLT out to our dev site, and, well, he did. You can see it in action here.
This is awesome. It stems from a request on the MODS list for comments and ideas surrounding MODS search points (and the development of a context set) in CQL. Well, since we use MODS to extract indexable data from our MARC for use by basic searches, I waded right in. And what came out is remarkably similar to what we’re already doing! So, YAY!
I’ll be extending our metadata extraction to cover more of the prescribed MODS search points listed there and then adding a search point to indexed field map that will cover the DC context set. The MARC context set will be handled a little differently, but most of the underlying code for that already exists as well. Then, open-ils.supercat will get a CQL to OpenILS search syntax translator. After that, it’s a SMOP to create an SRW/SRU server…
Hmm… that’s quite a bit to do, but at least we’re already heading towards what looks to be a new emerging standard and have a plan for full implementation that is just an extension of what we’re already doing and planning to do.
I love it when a plan comes together.