Re: php interface

On Sun, 2006-02-07 at 22:03 +0200, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Daniel O'Donnell writes:
>  > As far as I can tell--I'm a novice PHPer but experienced XML/XSLT
>  > person, so likely biased--the way to go for importing z3950 put into
>  > refdb is via XML: yaz provides good MARC to MARCXML functionality, and
>  > writing a stylesheet that mimics marc2ris probably wouldn't be to hard
>  > if the target were risx.
>  > 
> 
> I don't want to talk you out of this, but in the end the data have to
> be piped into refdbc anyway. If you convert MARC data internally to
> MARCXML and then to risx, you basically duplicate the existing MARC
> to RIS conversion. This at best duplicates the efforts to get better
> MARC support, but at worst it causes inconsistencies: The SQL data
> should not depend on the path how you import the data (command line
> vs. web interface). I'm not generally opposed to going through
> MARCXML, but if you follow this path, you should provide modular code
> which can be used from the command line as well.

Good point. The only reason for going the other way is that xslt support
is native to php5. But there's certainly lots of room for inconsistency
this way.

> 
>  > The advice on the net seems to be to avoid mixing perl and php; since
>  > xml handling is built into php 5, this seems both a safer and a more
>  > elegant approach.
> 
> We're not talking about mixing Perl and PHP. The PHP code will have to
> pipe data into refdbc (unless someone codes the client networking code
> directly in PHP). PHP will open a shell for this purpose, and PHP does
> not even notice whether the first command in the pipe is a C program
> (refdbc) or a Perl script (marc2ris).

I guess I'm just not knowledgeable enough to know how to do this. Right
now I think I'll work on cleaning up the html and CSS in the web version
of refdb and integrating a PHP_YAZ search page into the stack. Once
that's done, there will be time to learn how to transfer the data from
the external source to refdb.

> 
>  > 
>  > B. 
>  > As part of my experimentation, I thought I'd also play a bit with the
>  > refdb_php. In particular, I'd like to do two things:
>  > 
>  > 1) xhtml-ize the current html (make it well formed, use CSS instead of
>  > tables for positioning)
>  > 
> 
> You should keep in mind that the original web design (which is
> replicated in the current PHP interface) was created by a person not
> very capable of designing user interfaces (I'm talking about
> myself). If you start fiddling with the HTML/XHTML code, you should
> feel free to do a redesign as well, if it helps to improve your
> code. I'd appreciate clean XHTML + CSS code.
> 
>  > 2) change the output to either risx or tei xml (more possibilities for
>  > display and exchange)
>  > 
> 
> You should probably provide several output formats (see the Emacs
> interface). For entering new references we should think about
> designing an interface that does not directly show the underlying data
> format.
> 
>  > Any thoughts on either? I know nothing about making packages, so I'll be
>  > doing all this on my local installation as a hobby. I'm not quite sure
>  > how one posts progress or enables collaboration but I'm happy to do so.
>  > 
> 
> The easiest way is to sign up as a RefDB developer and use the
> subversion repository to publish your work and to collaborate. Let me
> know if you are interested.
> 
> regards,
> Markus
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor and Chair
Director, Digital Medievalist Project
<http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4

Tel. +1 (403) 329-2378
Fax. +1 (403) 382-7191

:@wiglaf (dapper ubuntu)


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