TalisLMS Connector for Jangle
Ross Singer
group as a whole. Jim Farrugia and I have been putting the final
touches on the Jangle article for the Code4lib journal and I have been
working on a connector for TalisLMS. The latter is coming along well,
you can see some examples here:
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/actors/
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/actors/088999284?format=vcard
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/resources/
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/resources/4475?format=marcxml
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/collections/
http://anvil.lisforge.net:4567/collections/6/resources/
It uses a combination of things to get the data:
For Actors and Items (not shown) it uses TalisLMS's Local Data Service
(LDS), a RESTful API included with Prism 3 (Talis' OPAC product).
Items aren't included in this demo, because the demo server I have
access to doesn't actually have items associated with bib records.
So, this is a TODO.
For Resources, it uses a combination of the Prism 3 platform store
(for bib ids, searching and sorting) and the Zebra Z39.50 interface
included with Alto (to get the MARC records). The platform store only
includes a very proprietary metadata format (bibrdf), and Zebra isn't
configured to allow sorting on last modified date, so both queries
(unfortunately) are necessary for now (at least to get MARC).
Collections are defined in the config.yml file. Basically it's a list
of indexes and values to search against the platform store (for, say,
books or serials).
The reason it's not running on jangle.org is that I cannot get
ruby-zoom to compile there. It wouldn't work anyway, because Site5
(the web host) doesn't allow outbound http requests, so it wouldn't be
able to query the platform. This is also the reason that it's not
proxying through demo.jangle.org.
I've set up another Jangle core at: http://anvil.lisforge.net:6767/
so you can try:
http://anvil.lisforge.net:6767/talislms/actors/
http://anvil.lisforge.net:6767/talislms/resources/
http://anvil.lisforge.net:6767/talislms/collections/
Formats with resources are timing out for some reason, not sure why.
One reason may be that they're doing xsl transforms *extremely*
inefficiently right now (record by record rather than on the entire
document). I plan on introducing the concept of feed level
stylesheets (and some xslts to do MARC to OAI DC, etc.) in the near
future. I've been working on them, just having some problems that
need ironing out first.
Anyway, this is a better example of using the tools that are at hand
(rather than the expectation of RDBMS access) to create a functional
Jangle connector.
-Ross.