Books, Ruby and Rendezvous
Here’s a clever idea from Chris Karr to use Ruby in conjunction with Rendezvous to share book lists over the web:
- A user starts up Books. Books starts the Ruby HTTP server and announces the presence of the server via Rendezvous.
- The Ruby HTTP server reads the user’s .books file and builds its internal data structures.
- A user sees that a new web server is present on the network and points their browser to the Ruby HTTP server. The server presents the user with a front-page that links to an index and search page …
Nice! I’m thinking Rendezvous + SRU/CQL could open up a world of possibilities for interoperability. Some of the OOoBib developers have recently been discussing the pros and cons of standardizing virtually all communication among bibliographic components on web services based on SRU/CQL. So, imagine databases accessible as a web service, and both formatting engines (XSLT, for example) and GUI’s taking advantage of that. So, desktop GUI application and standard web interface both access the database in the same way.
