This is the first of what I hope will be informative and helpful progress reports for the Evergreen software development project. In this report I plan on giving a broad, project-wide overview of events, decisions, issues, and milestones that have occurred recently within the project. I also hope this report elicits responses and comments from you, the reader. My goal is to compile this sort of report at least monthly. The official target audience for this report is the PINES Executive Committee, but, of course, I welcome anyone to read and comment. I should also mention that since this is my first report, and I have to cover multiple months, this will most likely be one of my larger reports.
Messaging
I’d like to share a word on communication. We’ve decided to start with Jabber (www.jabber.org) as the communication layer between the various components. Jabber is great because it can be as simple as you want while allowing for practically limitless expansion. Given the open nature of Jabber, for example, we could write our own server components that ‘plug in’ to the jabber server and perform additional tasks on messages besides simply routing them through the messaging network.
Bibliographic Data Storage and Access
Though there haven’t been many requests for the information in this post, we felt it would be a good idea to keep everyone up to date on the internal direction and progress we are making, much as Jason’s earlier post regarding the Staff Client did. What follows is an overview of where we are with regard to our storage and retrieval of library specific data. We will be focusing on the domain specific stuff, especially bibliographic data in the form of MARC records.