On 3/5/10 3:45 PM, Bill Dueber wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Houghton,Andrew<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>
>
>    
>> As you point out JSON streaming doesn't work with all clients and I am
>> hesitent to build on anything that all clients cannot accept.  I think part
>> of the issue here is proper API design.  Sending tens of megabytes back to a
>> client and expecting them to process it seems like a poor API design
>> regardless of whether they can stream it or not.  It might make more sense
>> to have a server API send back 10 of our MARC-JSON records in a JSON
>> collection and have the client request an additional batch of records for
>> the result set.  In addition, if I remember correctly, JSON streaming or
>> other streaming methods keep the connection to the server open which is not
>> a good thing to do to maintain server throughput.
>>
>>      
> I guess my concern here is that the specification, as you're describing it,
> is closing off potential uses.  It seems fine if, for example, your primary
> concern is javascript-in-the-browser, and browser-request,
> pagination-enabled systems might be all you're worried about right now.
>
> That's not the whole universe of uses, though. People are going to want to
> dump these things into a file to read later -- no possibility for pagination
> in that situation. Others may, in fact, want to stream a few thousand
> records down the pipe at once, but without a streaming parser that can't
> happen if it's all one big array.
>
> I worry that as specified, the *only* use will be, "Pull these down a thin
> pipe, and if you want to keep them for later, or want a bunch of them, you
> have to deal with marc-xml." Part of my incentive is to *not* have to use
> marc-xml, but in this case I'd just be trading one technology I don't like
> (marc-xml) for two technologies, one of which I don't like (that'd be
> marc-xml again).
>
> I really do understand the desire to make this parallel to marc-xml, but
> there's a seem between the two technologies that makes that a problematic
> approach.
>    
For my part, I'd like to explore the options of putting MARC data into 
CouchDB (which stores documents as JSON) which could then open the door 
for replicating that data between any number of installations of CouchDB 
as well as providing for various output formats (marc-xml, etc).

It's just an idea, but it's one that uses JSON outside of the browser 
and is a good proof case for any MARC in JSON format.

Thanks,
Benjamin

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