i've done some very ugly, preliminary hacking at getting MARC records out:

https://gist.github.com/roblivian/7012077

generally "works", but still need to account for more invalid MARC tags,
"on-the-fly" records (non-MARC records, i.e. reserve items, ordered bibs,
etc)



On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Thomale, Jason <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Everyone: You guys are fantastic. Thanks to those who have responded thus
> far for being so willing to share. I will be contacting y'all off-list, if
> you don't mind. :-)
>
> Just wanted to tag onto Dave's response here...
>
> > I've written a decent amount of code against Sierra, but I don't know if
> > any of it amounts to an "API".
> >
> ...
> > * I've also started creating little web services with mod_perl for use
> > in a
> > web-application I'm working on.  Examples: a script that spits back item
> > information in JSON when given an item barcode, a script that spits back
> > a
> > JSON list of all attached items when given a bib record number.  Again
> > these are mostly special purpose, but I have a notion to find ways to
> > generalize them.
>
> Yes this is basically where I am right now and where this is coming from.
> I've thrown together sort of a prototype app for helping us with some
> inventory stuff we're doing, which consists of a really quick-and-dirty web
> service that serves up JSON and a bootstrap/jQuery front-end. For what it
> is--which at this point isn't much more than a proof-of-concept--it works.
> But. In the coming year there are a lot of similar things we plan to do,
> and building out a RESTful API to serve up catalog data in particular ways
> seems like a logical step right now.
>
> Julia alluded to "some things you don't want to do when you're querying
> the database," which is something I'm interested in talking about as well.
> If my experiences are anything like yours, Julia, I'm finding things just
> aren't indexed in ways that make it optimal for our use cases. Namely,
> querying on most variable field data is out of the question if you don't
> want multi-minute response times. It seems the only way to get this to work
> well will be to dump portions of the database out to an external document
> store / indexer. I'm primarily looking at serving up JSON at this point, so
> probably something like Solr or Elasticsearch. Learning from your
> experiences building a Sierra driver for VuFind would be quite helpful and
> interesting.
>
> Francis, I'll be interested to see whether you're thinking along similar
> lines or if you're going a totally different direction...
>
> > Sadly, I'm a team of one here and I'm a bit shy about the state my code
> > is
> > currently in, so I haven't published it anywhere.  ( Also the way I use
> > git
> > locally is probably "wrong", not to mention there are probably passwords
> > in
> > old commits. )
>
> No worries! I completely understand, and I share your shyness. Believe me,
> I'm the last person that should judge.
>
> > Nonetheless, I'd definitely be interested in collaborating on anything
> > that
> > might benefit all Sierra users.
>
> Cool. I really appreciate it. I guess--at this point I'm still looking at
> solving local needs first, but making it easy enough to extend to new use
> cases. Or...at the very least doing something that will provide for a good
> learning experience. :-) I don't know, it's still ideas.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
>