A number of institutions are interested in collaborating on the creation of a REST API for DSpace, and a library of client code/apps. This page will serve as a place to facilitate that collaboration, and to make the work transparent to the DSpace developer community.
Interested Participants (if you are interested in participating in this collaboration, add your name here, and contact one of us to let us know):
Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dspace-rest
Meeting notes from the DSpace Futures discussion: DSpace Futures REST API Meeting Notes
Use Cases
- JavaScript widgets for researcher pages
- Integrate DSpace data into other systems
- To provide statistics / analysis. Data visualization / Data mining.
- Queryable
- Integrate with Drupal, Omeka
- External user interfaces
- in any language (PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, ...)
- web UI or desktop UI
- mobile applications
- administrative UI or a discovery UI (although for pure discovery UI, consider using Solr directly, see e.g. SkylightUI)
- interfaces for specialized collections
Technical Feedback
- Look up Item by Handle, in addition to ID.
- It should be able to scale well, (implement caching)
- Some of the business logic being un-earthed could make other UI's get modified.
- i.e. OAI / RSS feeds to use REST API for certain parts
- lots of business logic should go somewhere DRY
Proof of Concept
Production Level Examples
- Monash University Pharmacy Faculty Saber project http://saber.monash.edu/ utilising Wijiti REST API version and Joomla with JSpace connector.
