On May 17, 2004, at 4:10 PM, Ben Ostrowsky wrote:

> I've been avoiding Yaz and JZKit because I don't know C, C++ or Java
> yet.
> (Perl and PHP can do most of the things I need.)

YAZ, IMHO, is an underutilized tool in most of our shops. It seems to
be more popular tool for commercial vendors who integrate it into their
applications. For example, I believe it as component of ExLibris's
MetaLib.

YAZ is essentially a C library. It provides the functionality to
communicate with Z39.50 servers. Its companion tool, Zebra, is an
indexer (like swish). You can feed Zebra files and it will create an
index of those files. YAZ and its friends can then search this index.
(Swish is an indexer as well as a search engine.) YAZ can be bound to
other programming languages. I believe both PHP and Perl have such
bindings. Similarly, YAZ can be compiled into your Apache server as one
of those mod_ modules, but I haven't tried it yet. NET::Z3950 provides
a way to search Z39.50 databases (indexes), and it relies on YAZ.
Similarly, Zebra is a way to create Z30.50-accessible indexes.

Finally. I concur with Ed when he suggests SimpleServer. This Perl
module (also written by the folks a IndexData) should allow you to
provide access to just about any database/index through a Z39.50
interface, without the use of Zebra. It captures a number of standard
Z39.50 interactions from clients and allows you to pass those
interactions (queries) on to your own database/index whether that be a
MySQL database or a swish index.

--
Eric Lease Morgan