RE: ZNG: "Z39.50 Next Generation"

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, LeVan,Ralph wrote:

> > From: Joe Futrelle [mailto:futrelle@ncsa.uiuc.edu]
> > A much more conservative approach to "modernizing" Z39.50 is to encode
> > protocol messages in XER and transport them over HTTP, say in SOAP.
>
> We weren't looking for conservative.  We were looking to make it easy for
> non-Z39.50 implementors to use our databases.  I have developers here at
> OCLC that are desperate for something much lighter than embedded Z39.50
> clients to fetch records out of databases.

> We've been developing Z39.50 utilities here at OCLC for more than ten years
> now and have considerable expertise in the area.  But we constantly have
> problems trying to explain how to do this to our programmers.  The new way
> to do it is trivial and uses standard tools that we expect all programmers
> to understand.

Great, so set up an SQL or http (etc) interface of some devising to your Z
databases. That doesn't need a protocol, it needs a cgi script to act as a
gateway.

Get your programmers who are experienced in Z to write an API for your non
Z programmers to use. If you chose to publish this API such that others
can use it, more power to you. /This/ would be a productive way forward,
rather than discarding bits which are complex but have already been
implemented by others.

But changing the protocol so that programmers who can't be bothered
spending the time to learn the protocol can have an easier time is just
ludicrous.

As Joe suggests, a modern approach would be to use XER for encoding the
PDUs.  This doesn't create any problems for servers which already support
the standard, it just adds an alternative modern interface to them which
would possibly be more familiar to new developers.

> If a developer needs the title of the record with ISBN of 12345, they can do
> it either of these two ways:

The problem is when the user wants to do something a little bit more
useful than this.  For example, they know from a list somewhere that
there's a Z39.50 database at address:port, and want to search for
something and return the marc results sorted by date in a human readable
format.

ZNG is basically just OAI with search as far as I can tell from the
specification page provided. While OAI has its uses, it's not a search
protocol and was never designed to be one.  Why not call it OAING rather
than ZNG, as this is significantly closer to what it is in reality? (Apart
from the strange looking acronym :) )

Rob

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Received on Friday, 13 July 2001 12:27:06 UTC