> Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 01:04:46 +0100
> From: Robert Sanderson <[log in to unmask]>
>
> On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Christian Boulanger wrote:
>> Hi Robert, this looks interesting! Do you know of any PHP/Perl etc.
>> scripts which can do SRW/SRU requests / parsing? I guess I have to
>> have a look at SOAP after all.
["Robert"? Anyway ...]
> Not for PHP/Perl, but I've copied to the development list for SRW to
> see if anyone has done any work in this area. I seem to recall that
> Eric Morgan at Notre Dame was using Perl?
>
> Probably the biggest requirement is a CQL parser, of which there's
> three OSS implementations (Java, C and Python) and a couple I know
> of which aren't released to the public yet including C#.
To state the obvious, a CQL parser is only required on the server
side. The lack of a parser is no impediment to implementing SRW/U
_clients_ in the language of your choice.
> Perl has a good SOAP module, but I've not recently tried out the SRW
> WSDL in it. (It didn't work last time due to document/literal style)
I think the SOAP module that Rob's referring to is SOAP::Lite, which
is indeed well spoken of and works nicely for many simple web
services. However, it struggles with SRW. I seem to recall that
about a year ago, I did manage to cudgel it into submission and
persuade it to do an SRW searchRetrieve, but it wasn't a pleasant
process. I don't remember details, but I do remember a sense that I
had to force the module into a mould that was contrary to the essence
of what it's supposed to be.
More generally, I get the impression that the SRW WSDL is not widely
comprehensible to toolkits. I don't know much -- well, anything,
really -- about WSDL so I can't comment intelligently on this, but I
get the impression that while the SRW service definition is not
intrinsically complex, the current WSDL expresses it in a more complex
way than necessary, and it's this particular expression that trips up
the toolkits. I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but if anyone else
has similar experiences, it would be good to speak up. I think it
would be an enormous practical incentive to the widespread adoption of
SRW if the WSDL were as undemanding as possible on the toolkits, even
if that simplicity has to be achieved at the expense of some elegance.
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