Rudimentary Jangle support for Scriblio now available

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Ross Singer

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Nov 14, 2008, 3:30:41 PM11/14/08

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Hi, everybody. Pardon the crossposting, but I doubt there's that much
crossover membership between groups.

I have cobbled together some very basic Jangle functionality for
Scriblio: basically what's available is data import and real-time
holdings/availability information. For the Scriblio folks, Jangle is
an AtomPub-based API to library systems. For the Jangle folks,
Scriblio is a NextGen OPAC build in WordPress.

Here's a demo:

http://scriblio.jangle.org/?m=200811

The files are available here:
http://code.google.com/p/jangle/downloads/list?q=label:scriblio

There is importer_jangle.php that would go in the Scriblio plugin
directory, a Jangle Availability plugin (which would just go in in the
wp-content/plugins directory) and a revised style.css to deal with the
availability stuff.

It's certainly not perfect at this point: it needs incremental
imports and it does each Resource's Item lookup individually, since I
couldn't figure out how to loop through all of the posts in a given
page to get their URIs to limit it to one request. If it seems really
slow, it's not Scriblio or Jangle -- it's the cheap shared web hosting
that the Jangle demo lives on.

What it shows, though, is how easy it is to implement Jangle into
projects like this. It took me two and a half days to get this going.
One and half days of those two were lost when I realized I wrote the
original version against an old version of Scriblio. Most of that
time was learning how plugins in WP work. Casey probably could have
knocked this out (and better) before lunch.

I'm kicking around the idea of adding another plugin to have borrower
interaction to show how Actors could work in a system like this, but
I'm not sure when I might be able to get to it.

If you want to try it and you've already got Scriblio, it requires a
change to the scrib_harvest table in MySQL -- change the sourceid
field's VARCHAR length to 255.

If you don't already have Scriblio, I think you should be fine if you
import from "Scriblio Jangle Importer" before you use "Scriblio
Catalog Importer".