ARK Implementation Challenges

[Mark Phillips]

Just to kick off another discussion.  

I'm wondering if others have run into technology challenges with various frameworks when trying to implement ARKs. 

For example,   we ran into a problem a few years ago when we tried to use wsgi instead of mod_python for our Django deployment.  We had trouble being able to see if a URL had the single trialing question mark after the ark.  We were able to get at this information with mod_python but the implementation of wsgi at the time never let us have the raw url requested.  

Anybody else run into any issues with their frameworks ?

Mark

[Esmé Cowles]

At one point, we were trying to create a Java webapp dedicated to handling /ark:/ URLs, and tried to create a webapp named "ark:". Tomcat wouldn't allow the colon in the filename. We were using Apache as the front-end anyway, so it was easy to just use mod_rewrite to rewrite the /ark:/ URLs to /xdre/ark/.

-Esme
--
Esme Cowles <esco...@ucsd.edu>

"I don't need to be forgiven." -- The Who, Baba O'Reilly

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/arks-forum/-/Z0gaU7NDl1oJ.
> To post to this group, send email to arks-...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/arks-forum?hl=en.
>

[Michael J. Giarlo]

Yes indeed. I ran into problems routing full ARK URIs using Rails. If I had jumped through some hoops, I'm sure I could have gotten past it. But at the moment I didn't have a compelling justification to deploy "full-blown" ARKs vs. noids.

-Mike

[John A. Kunze]

We also encountered issues with some web server software (eg, Tomcat,
Django, Microsoft IIS) handling the colons and the trailing '?' or '??'.
The Apache HTTP server is robust in this regard, and that's what we use
for the n2t.net resolver.

With Apache HTTP server the colon isn't a problem, and the trailing
question mark can be converted to a regular CGI-friendly query string
with a Rewrite rules. You can then hook it up to any server process that
returns the right metadata. N2T uses the general-purpose rules below.

-John

----
# Detect ? and ?? inflections and map with THUMP compatibility mode.
# One question mark case: ? -> ?thump=0&show=brief&as=anvl/erc
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \?
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "$1?thump=0&show=brief&as=anvl/erc"

# Two question mark case: ?? -> ?thump=0&show=support&as=anvl/erc
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^\?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "$1?thump=0&show=support&as=anvl/erc"