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diff --git a/www/p5-SRU/pkg-descr b/www/p5-SRU/pkg-descr new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..dc0e39f3add9 --- /dev/null +++ b/www/p5-SRU/pkg-descr @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +The SRU package provides a framework for working with the Search and +Retrieval by URL (SRU) protocol developed by the Library of Congress. SRU +defines a web service for searching databases containing metadata and +objects. SRU often goes under the name SRW which is a SOAP version of the +protocol. You can think of SRU as a RESTful version of SRW, since all the +requests are simple URLs instead of XML documents being sent via some sort +of transport layer. + +You might be interested in SRU if you want to provide a generic API for +searching a data repository and a mechanism for returning metadata +records. SRU defines three verbs: explain, scan and searchRetrieve which +define the requests and responses in a SRU interaction. + +This set of modules attempts to provide a framework for building an SRU +service. The distribution is made up of two sets of Perl modules: modules +in the SRU::Request::* namespace which represent the three types of +requests; and modules in the SRU::Response::* namespace which represent +the various responses. + +Typical usage is that a request object is created using a factory method +in the SRU::Request module. The factory is given either a URI or a CGI +object for the HTTP request. SRU::Request will look at the URI and build +the appropriate request object: SRU::Request::Explain, SRU::Request::Scan +or SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve. + +Once you've got a request object you can build a response object by using +the factory method newFromRequest() in SRU::Request. This method will +examine the request and build the corresponding result object which you +can then populate with result data appropriately. When you are finished +populating the response object with results you can call asXML() on it to +get the full XML for your response. + +To understand the meaning of the various requests and their responses +you'll want to read the docs at the Library of Congress. A good place to +start is SRW/U In Five Hundred Words +http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/brief.html For more information +about working with the various request and response objects in this +distribution see the POD in the individual packages: + + * SRU::Request + * SRU::Request::Explain + * SRU::Request::Scan + * SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve + * SRU::Response + * SRU::Response::Explain + * SRU::Response::Scan + * SRU::Response::SearchRetrieve + * SRU::Server + +Questions and comments are more than welcome. This software was developed +as part of a National Science Foundation grant for building distributed +library systems in the Ockham Project. More about Ockham can be found at +http://www.ockham.org. + +WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU +Author: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> |