[Announce] YAZ 2.0 -- now with SRW support

Hi all,

Apologies for the cross-posting from our own announce-lists, but for anyone 
who feels like playing with the SRW protocol, we thought this might be 
interesting.

Apart from a slew of updates and fixes, the most interesting aspect of this 
release is probably that it includes support for the core parts of the SRW 
protocol in the client and server roles. In a nutshell, the high-level ZOOM 
client-API now allows you to execute parallel operations against a mix of 
Z39.50 (v1, v2) and SRW 1.0 servers. This functionality should eventually 
percolate into those those other ZOOM implementations that are based on 
YAZ/ZOOM.

Why use a dedicated toolkit to implement SRW as opposed to a standard SOAP 
tool? First, our early experiments with SRW have shown us that many of the 
current generation of SOAP toolkits are somewhat less than fully reliable, 
and some are platform-specific (our SOAP implementation uses libXML). Also, 
many of them are designed for conventional remote procedure-call 
interactions -- not parallel searching and retrieval operations which is 
where we think the real fun of Z39.50 begins. Finally, 'hiding' the SRW 
protocol under the abstraction of the ZOOM API makes it close to trivial to 
implement clients that can communicate seamlessly and concurrently with SRW 
and Z39.50 targets.

On the server side, the generic front-end server now also supports SRW -- 
allowing you to support both protocols in a single server with a limited 
effort.

The software page, and full changelog, is available from 
http://www.indexdata.com/yaz/.

Cheers,

--Sebastian
--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data <http://www.indexdata.dk/>
Ph: +45 3341 0100, Fax: +45 3341 0101

Received on Saturday, 1 March 2003 17:43:06 UTC