Bib Formatting as Web Service?
I have come to believe that innovation in open source bibliographic software must come from adopting standards (and in some cases creating them), and in modularizing the pieces that make the puzzle: data storage and query, online record access, interaction with word-processors and such, and bibliographic formatting. Trying to do everything as a monolithic application is just too difficult.
My stylesheets address the last. One question I’m left with is how to actually integrate the processing into other applications, particularly when those applications may be written in a variety of languages (PHP, C++, Ruby, Pthon, C, etc.), while there is only one currently available implementation of XSLT 2.0: Saxon, which is written in Java.
So I posted a note to the (excellent) xsl list, and got this suggestion from Saxon author Michael Kay:
Consider implementing the transformation as a web service and invoking it from the client application via HTTP calls. The client need never know that the transformation is done using XSLT, let alone that it’s done using an XSLT processor written in Java.
This is an intriguing idea. In essence, it’d be an XML-based, unicode-enabled, web service version of bibtex for the 21st century. Indeed, all that’s really involved in processing a document with the citations is to send a source document with the embedded MODS records—along with the citation style parameter—to the processor, and get the formatted document (or zip file, or whatever) back.
Any thoughts on how well this might work with traditional desktop applications? Could a demo of such a service be hosted on Sourceforge (I have a project set up; just haven’t announced anything yet)? Anyone out there interested in trying to implement this? I have no Java skills, and no time to learn.
