Re: Hotel booking for ZIG meeting at the British Library, Boston Spa

> Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 12:22:54 -0400
> From: Ray Denenberg <rden@loc.gov>
> 
> Sebastian is planning the tutorial, and we'll have more details soon
> (hopefully before the hotel deadline).  He has told me that the
> tutorial will focus on pragmatic issues and try to counter the
> "Z39.50 is hard" perceptions by showing how easy it actually can
> be.

Since Sebastian doesn't seem to be breaking radio silence at the
moment, I may as well throw in the fact that I've been asked to
present a part of the tutorial.  The idea will be to look at how to
build Z39.50 client applications using an Object-Oriented API (for
which bindings exist to two languages with more to come), hopefully
showing how "easy things are made easy, but hard things are possible"
(to paraphrase one of the guiding goals of Perl.)

> It will probably not address the details of ASN.1 to the same level
> as earlier tutorials but rather in a more summary fashion.

Absolutely.  I wouldn't be surprised if the tutorial doesn't cover or
even mention ASN and BER at all -- if one thing has become clear in
the last year or so, it's that no-one wants to know about them :-)

Seriously, those are topics for people who want to build new low-level
toolkits.  Our feeling is that there are already several of those
around, and that the sort of people who are likely to want to write
new ones will not be coming to the ZIG tutorial to find out how!  We
very much want to focus on easy ways to _deploy_ Z39.50 -- much as web
tutorials tend to focus much more on how HTTP can be deployed to solve
real problems rather than on how to converse with (or build!) an HTTP
server.

Hope that helps anyone who's trying to make up their mind whether to
come to the tutorials.  I promise to be as witty as I can in my
session, and also to give out free chocolate to everyone who attends
:-)

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor | <mike@miketaylor.org.uk> | www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Adjectives are like spices, to be used for flavour, with
	 care: not to kill the essential flavour of the sentence" --
	 Rheal Nadeau.

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2001 05:51:50 UTC