On Friday, December 17th, the PINES Software Development staff conducted presentations on the Evergreen project at the PINES Executive Committee meeting in Dawsonville, Georgia. We covered widely varying areas of the software in these presentations. In this written report, I am going to glean some of the more interesting or important points from those presentations and also add a little additional in-depth information.
mozilla/xpcom/javascript
So we’ve reached a small milestone this week.. I’ll start from the beginning.
Mozilla, which we’re using as the client side software platform, has a built in framework called XPCOM which allows developers to add software components to the overall application. For example, if you developed a fast XML processing application that you wanted to use from within Mozilla, you just have to write some XPCOM ‘glue’ code to plug the component into the Mozilla application proper. You will then be able to use your XML library from within javascript, which is used to develop Mozilla applications. Currently there is built in XPCOM support for javascript and c++, and there are efforts under way to bring other languages into the fold – Python and Perl to name a few.
A Tale of Two Encodings
In my last post I explained the basics of how we will be handling MARC records as XML. To recap, we will store our bibliographic record as MARC21slim XML documents. This format is recommended and maintained by the Library of Congress, so we feel confident using it. Now we just need to morph our binary records into XML! (WARNING: What follows is pretty technical, so hang on tight.)
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