Welcome to the Service-Proxy (SP) project pages, here you will find all you ever need to know about SP, including end-user documentation, configuration examples, JavaDoc API documentation and low-level project reports (dependencies, SCM and issue (bug) tracking information, project team).

What is Service-Proxy?

Service-Proxy is a piece of middle-tier software that sits between the Pazpar2 meta-search engine, the Torus target data store and the User Interface.

Service-Proxy has an extensible architecture via a software modules called plugins. Plugins can be assembled into processing 'chains'. Those chains provide provide additional capabilities on top of the meta-searcher (e.g by enriching and post-processing records, e.g 'All-Copies-Everywhere' search) and/or additional services to the UI layer (e.g authentication capabilities, persistent record storage). SP comes with stock plugins that allow 'proxying' requests to Pazpar2 (without explicit session management), authentication and target configuration using the Torus data store and much more. New plugins can be written in a straightforward manner: by adhering to the simple service-proxy-api that builds on top of Servlet API, packaging classes in a jar file and dropping to the SP container.

Service-Proxy is highly configurable -- inclusion and order of plugins in the processing chains can be freely adjusted via a simple configuration file (standard java .properties file).