Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Ariadne article about SeeAlso linkserver protocol

13. November 2008 um 11:32 Keine Kommentare

The current issue of Ariadne which has just been published contains an article about the „SeeAlso“ linkserver protocol: Jakob Voß: „SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol„, Ariadne Issue 57, 2008.

SeeAlso combines OpenSearch and unAPI to a simple API that delivers list of links. You can use it for dynamically embedding links to recommendations, reviews, current availability, reviews, search completion suggestions, etc. It’s no rocket science but I found a well defined API with reusable server and client better then having to hack a special format and lookup syntax for each single purpose.

The reference client is written in JavaScript and the reference server is written in Perl. Implementing it in any other language should not be complicated. I’d be happy to get some feedback either in form of code, applications, or criticism. 🙂 I noted that SeeAlso::Server is the only implementation of unAPI at CPAN so far – if someone is interested, we could extract parts into an independent unAPI package. The WWW::OpenSearch::Description package is also worth to consider for use in SeeAlso::Server.