| Whois++, CIP ?
| teach me, I'm all eyes!
Hi!
Well, you could grab our implementation of both of the above in ROADS
version 2 beta, from... <URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/> :-)
There are still quite a few bogosities in this code, mostly due to our
slack programming style. For the next major release, which should
start to appear in a couple of months' time, we're going for an
approach which gets "strict" on the library code and encapsulates most
of the core operations in Perl objects. In theory this should let us
use the ROADS software as a front end to lots of backend storage and
indexing/retrieval systems, e.g. Glimpse, Swish, freeWAIS, Access(!).
Fingers crossed!
| why do you say Z39.50 is outdated?
It's an awful lot of trouble to go to just to ship queries and
responses around - so much so that people seem to be having real
problems building interoperable implementations (e.g. of the powerful
"explain" feature). WAIS implemented a pragmatic subset of Z39.50
back in, when was it... 1988, and look what happened to them! There's
also the use of the profile system by vendors to lock their customers
into continuing to buy their products, in spite of supposedly selling
open systems :-(
Ciao!
Martin