Ruby/ZOOM

Ruby/ZOOM provides a Ruby binding to the Z39.50 Object-Orientation Model (ZOOM), an abstract object-oriented programming interface to a subset of the services specified by the Z39.50 standard, also known as the international standard ISO 23950.

This software is based (and therefore depends) on YAZ, a free-software implementation of the Z39.50/SRW/SRU standards, but could be easily ported to any ZOOM compliant implementation.

Ruby/ZOOM is free-software, covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License and provided without any warranties of any kind.

Requirements

Ruby:       http://www.ruby-lang.org/
YAZ (*):    http://www.indexdata.dk/yaz/ 

* : Make sure you did pass the --enabled-shared option to the configure
    script before building YAZ.  Ruby/ZOOM requires a YAZ shared library 
    and YAZ does not build it by default. 

Build from Source

0. checkout out code from git at github
1. install Rake
2. rake 
3. gem install pkg/zoom-*.gem

Build from Source using bundler

0. add to your Gemfile:
gem 'zoom', :git => 'https://github.com/bricestacey/ruby-zoom.git'
1. bundle

Samples

Some programming examples are available in the `sample' directory. 

Canonical Sample Program

To give a flavour of the Ruby binding, here is ZOOM's equivalent of the ``Hello World'' program: a tiny Z39.50 client that fetches and displays the MARC record for Farlow & Brett Surman's The Complete Dinosaur from the Library of Congress.

require 'zoom'

ZOOM::Connection.open('z3950.loc.gov', 7090) do |conn|
  conn.database_name = 'Voyager'
  conn.preferred_record_syntax = 'USMARC'
  rset = conn.search('@attr 1=7 0253333490')
  p rset[0]
end

ZOOM Extended Services

With release 0.4.1 extended services support has been added which allows create, update and delete of records. This only works for XML. Here's an example adapted from the test suite.

require 'zoom'

new_record = File.read('programming_ruby.xml')

ZOOM::Connection.open('localhost:99999/test') do |conn|
  p = conn.package
  p.wait_action = 'waitIfPossible'
  p.action = 'specialUpdate'
  p.record = new_record
  p.send('update')
  p.send('commit')     
end

Copying

Copyright (c) 2005 Laurent Sansonetti <lrz@chopine.be>
  
This library is free software.
You can distribute/modify this program under the terms of
the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1.

Project Website

http://ruby-zoom.rubyforge.org