[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Evergreen API

[rogan.hamby at yclibrary.net]

To echo Dan, and without reading ahead to the weekend's posts,  
developers usually talk about APIs in terms of methods of accessing  
the functions of a system.  Usually, the APIs are bundled and  
published because the core system is closed in some way or licensing  
is involved.  If you want a fascinating discussion right now about  
what APIs really are the Google / Oracle lawsuit has brought a lot of  
great information into the open about what people agree APIs are and  
what they disagree about them being and the legal grey area of them.

Anyway, that aside Evergreen is very open and doesn't really need APIs  
in that Oracle / Sun sense that they were published.  But, Evergreen's  
methods of access certainly could be documented better and  
documentation is generally a big challenge for open source projects as  
they grow.  I do not envy the challenge the DIG folks have though I  
admire what they're doing.

Quoting Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net>:

> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 07:18:09PM -0700, Lori Bowen Ayre wrote:
>> Hi Devs and Community,
>>
>> Has there ever been serious consideration given to developing an Evergreen
>> API?  And if not, why not?
>>
>> I'm just wondering if that might be something that we could make happen as
>> a community, perhaps with funds we raise through some clever activity or by
>> selling some groovy merchandise.  We've been talking about doing something
>> like that on the Oversight Board although no particular project has been
>> suggested.
>>
>> But, I may suggest developing an Evergreen API unless there's some reason
>> not do.  Please advise!
>
> Maybe you need to define what you mean by API. If you mean "a set of
> methods that you can call to return data or produce results", then I
> think Evergreen has had that since day one. It would be really hard for
> us to develop Evergreen without an API. A Google search for "Evergreen
> API" returns this as hit #2 for me: http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=46
>
> What we have could certainly use a lot more documentation in many
> places, but we currently have native bindings for Perl, Python, Java, C,
> and a Google Summer of Code project to pull together an official PHP
> binding... all talking to the same API.
>



----------------------
Rogan Hamby
Manager Rock Hill Library & Reference Services
York County Library System

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's  
too dark
to read." - Groucho Marx