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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>
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