I shouldn't respond to such blatant trolling, but heh...
On Wed, 7 May 2008, Casey Durfee wrote:
SRU is crap, in my opinion -- overengineered and under-thought, incomprehensible to non-librarians and burdened by the weight of history.
What is so incomprehensible about it? Is it the fact it uses XML? No? Is it the REST like interface? No? Ahh... the extremely familiar but not hideously over-complicated and inappropriate (such as SQL, SPARQL or XQuery) query language? That you can just put the URLs into your web browser and use XSLT to display the results, rather than requiring M2M interfaces?
The notion that it was designed to be used by all kinds of clients on all kinds of data is irrelevant in my book. Nobody in the *library world* uses it, much less non-libraries. APIs are for use. You don't get any points
Except for, you know, small projects like The European Library (which is the template for the nascent European Digital Library), the Library of Congress, DSpace, most digital library systems, etc etc etc. And IndexData have interfaces to many sources of data via SRU, for when it's not natively implemented.
for idealogical correctness. A non-librarian could look at that API document, understand it all, and start working with it right away. There is no way you can say that about SRU.
I will say it, right now. I've had non librarian students look at the document and start working with it straight away. Multiple times. My apologies if you don't have similar experiences.
Kudos to the OpenLibrary team, whatever the reason was, for coming up with something better that people outside the library world might actually be willing to use.
It's totally arbitrary JSON with a very small fraction of the functionality and at least as much complexity. If people are willing to use it then that's great, certainly. Rob
