On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Nathan Vack wrote:

> Sure isn't elegant, but as our Real Systems Guys don't want us to
> look at the production Oracle instance (performance worries), we've
> had pretty good luck screen-scraping holdings and status data, once
> we get a Bib ID. Ugly, but functional, and surprisingly fast.

We've come at this by setting up a simple web-service that does the
screen-scraping. The current implementation is based on ISBNs for our
purposes, but could easily be extended to look up via bib-id.

After screen-scaping item-status info for a python program, and then
needing to do it again for a php script, a Services-Oriented-
Architecture article I read 'clicked', followed by an inspiring
Access presentation from Richard Ackerman and a BOFeather talk with
him and, I think, Stephen Anthony.

Since we can't SQL-query our own ILS data directly... (ok, blood
pressure is fine again) this solved a lot of issues.

A bit of info on the web-service (with some examples), which includes
a link to Peter Murray's jester blog article on SOA that prompted
this thinking:

<http://128.148.7.210/~birkin/wikinotes/doku.php?
id=public:soa_josiah_status>

As to Michel Doran's insightful post about session-repercussions of
http-calls...

- I hadn't thought of that, and don't know what if any licensing
issues we have regarding that, but I'm curious and will look into this.

- We aren't using this service heavily, but if we were, I would think
this web-service model would actually scale well in terms of the
session issue, because the hits would come from the single web-
service 'user' -- as opposed to other models where, for instance, a
cron job might initiate a screen-scrape, resulting in each of those
instances being perceived as a different user. Does my thinking on
this sound right?

Last, I set this up not knowing that Z39.50 calls can return status
info. I recently found that out by stumbling across a discussion
between Godmar Back and index-data folk about php/yaz.

<http://lists.indexdata.dk/pipermail/yazlist/2005-December/001453.html>

We're now investigating changing the backend to get the data this way
instead of the fragile screen-scrape. The beauty of the SOA model is
that changing the backend won't have any effect on the systems that
call this service.

-Birkin

---
Birkin James Diana
Programmer, Web Services
Brown University Library
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