[Koha-zebra] ZOOM API [was Worries about zebra]

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi Sebastian et al,

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 05:14:26PM -0400, Sebastian Hammer wrote:

> o YAZ/ZOOM supports certain extensions to Z39.50 which allows a Perl 
> application to directly manage databases in a Zebra installation, update 
> records, etc. I believe that this may be the neatest and most efficient way 
> to integrate an application like Koha with Zebra.. superior to system() 
> calling the Zebra command-line interface, and more robust than the native 
> Zebra Perl API, which was developed by a third party and which may not be 
> entirely reliable.
Could you expand a bit on the extensions (or point to some docs on them) so
we can get an idea of the range of transactions possible?

> The big catch is that there is not presently a Perl-wrapper directly over 
> the YAZ/ZOOM "C" language API.. I ran into a fellow at ALA who used it 
> indirectly, by accessing the Visual Basic implementation directly through 
> Perl, under Windows, but of course that would leave our Unix customers 
> stranded.  :-)   At Index Data, we've developed most of our web-based 
> applications in PHP so we haven't been strongly motivated to work on this 
> yet... However, we do have a functional implementation of a Perl API over 
> YAZ/ZOOM floating around the office which might be a good starting point. 
How can we get our hands on that API? ;-).

Thanks,
-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
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