Re: [VuFind-Tech] Jangle: Why such an emphasis?

[Andrew N. <and...@vi...>]

> But the sense I am getting now if you want any connection to your ILS,
> it will be required to be Jangle.  That takes the skills that we have
> invested in our own ILS APIs out of the equation and makes us dependent
> on an independent application that has no foundation (yet) to be a
> factor with our ILS vendor.  We have that ability because we have the
> relationship.  Jangle folks as a whole do not.

I don't think I am explaining myself well here. The only thing that would really change in the adoption of Jangle is how VuFind interacts with the ILS driver itself.  Right now, the ILS driver is a PHP class that is loaded directly into VuFind.  With Jangle, VuFind would talk to it much like how it talks to Solr now - via HTTP.  Jangle would then have a series of ILS drivers loaded for each ILS that is not ILS-DI compatible.  For those that are ILS-DI compatible, Jangle would use the ILS-DI driver.

>
> So from this point of view, if you want to support Jangle with VUFind,
> that's great - go for it.  But don't do it at the expense of taking
> away
> the ILS Driver philosophy.  That removes the agnosticism that VUFind
> was
> initially marketed as, but now required to know Jangle and be able to
> support Jangle.  (which again I re-iterate: don't expect everyone to be
> able to support Atom Publishing Protocol.)

VuFind will continue to be ILS agnostic and Jangle will only help it be better. I don't think you clearly understand the uses and implications of Jangle and how it would work within VuFind.  Im probably not explaining myself very clearly.  I really don't see much change happening to VuFind in how the ILS Drivers work.  We are basically just making the ILS Drivers better by abstracting them into another community.

And don't forget, Jangle is open source - so we can tweak it if it doesn't quite fit the needs of VuFind.

Im struggling for a way to better explain myself - but I feel confident that Jangle will only help the progress of VuFind and not be a hindrance.

Here is some more information on how this might work:
http://code.google.com/p/jangle/wiki/ApproachesToWritingAConnector

Andrew