OpenRequest3 Beta2

OpenRequest3 beta2 is completed today.

OpenRequest3 is the next major revision of an open source system for resource sharing. Initially, the project was devised to quickly enable smaller Library Management System vendors to provide ISO ILL messaging capabilities. In version 2, additions were made for very large scale operations wanting to replace their legacy messaging infrastructure. OpenRequest3 adds web service API's for managing the request process, and a native web application that can be used out of the box to participate in resource sharing networks. Although the system started out life as a java toolkit project to support ISO 10161 and ISO 10160 ILL messaging, it has evolved into a service component capable of integrating with any host system capable of talking web services (WSDL is used to define the interface). At the same time, the back end has evolved into an engine capable of integrating with many different messaging protocols including generic script, simple email and email with web-links.

Beta2 adds the following:

OR-Infrastructure
* Embedded Tomcat for web services and native web application

OR-API
* Web service support for creating new locations and endpoints from host systems
* Web service support for location inbox monitoring
* Web service support for marking messages read
* Web service support for create request
* Web service support for shipped
* Web service support for cancel

OR-Web Application
* End user registration
* End user location creation
* End user requesting
* User home page listing user locations
* View location
* View transactions
* Bulk action transactions

OpenRequest3 can be used in three distinct ways

1) Simply as a protocol library. The jar contains all the basic BER routines to encode and decode ISO 10161 protocol messages. If you just need to be able to do ISO messaging, this library takes the leg work out of the encoding process. Nobody really uses the library in this form to the best of our knowledge.

2) As a protocol engine or ILL ASE (Application Service Environment) OpenRequest takes care of sending, receiving, and storing ILL messages. Client applications (The HOST LMS most often) talks to the engine via and API to arrange for messages to be sent and to pick up notifications of incoming events. In OpenRequest2 this was done with java RMI or database integration. OpenRequest3 adds WebServices interfaces that can be called locally or remotely. OR3 also now uses tomcat in embedded mode, so setup and installation is greatly simplified.

3) In order to ease testing, there is an OpenRequest web application. Users can simply use this application out of the box to manage locations, send and receive requests, or to check location/transaction/message status. Developers find the webapp useful for getting going with the protocol, slowly replacing the web interface features with calls to their own host system. Other users may wish to simply rebrand the web application and just use it out of the box to provide a fully working resource sharing messaging system in just a few minutes.

Contact ian dot ibbotson at k hypen int dot com for more information and access to the test system. Source can be downloaded from the knowledge integration subversion system, snapshot builds uploaded to the maven2 repository.