Inspired by Jakub’s posting yesterday, I wondered how easy it would be to build an HTTP-to-Z39.50 gateway similar to his in Ruby, my language of the moment. Different languages offer different tools and different ways of doing things, and it’s always instructive to compare.

Ruby libraries are generally distributed in the form of “gems”: packages analogous to the .deb files used by the Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating systems, so before we start installing the Ruby libraries that we’re going to need, we have to install the rubygems package that does that installation. The gems system is like Debian’s dpkg and apt-get all rolled into one, as it knows how to fetch packages as well as how to install them; and it has something of the BSD “ports” mechanism about it, too, as gem installation can include building, most usually when the gem is not pure Ruby but includes glue-code to an underlying C library – as in the case of Ruby-ZOOM.

While we’re installing the gems system, we may as well also ensure that we have Ruby itself installed, plus the header-files needed for building gems that include a C component, and Ruby’s OpenSSL and FastCGI support. On my Ubuntu 9.04 system, I used:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev rubygems1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libfcgi-dev

Once that’s been done, we can install the Ruby gems that we need for the Web-to-Z39.50 gateway. These are:

• rack is the web-server API, which works with various different specific web servers, invoking application-specific code to handle requests.
• thin is one of several specific Ruby-based web servers that we could use – it’s roughly analogous to something like Tomcat.
• zoom is the Ruby implementation of the ZOOM abstract API .

Depending on how your Ruby installation is set up, you may or may not already have the various prerequisite gems that thin needs; it’s harmless to ask for an already-installed gem to be installed, so you may as well just ask.

So to install the necessary gems, then, I did:

$ sudo gem install rack thin zoom test-spec camping memcache-client mongrel

We’re all done with installing – now it’s time to write the web server. And here it is!

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘thin’
require ‘zoom’

class <span class="caps">ZOOMC</span>lient
  def call(env)
    req = Rack::Request.new(env)
    headers = { ‘Content-Type’ => ‘text/plain’ }
    zurl = req[‘zurl’] or return [ 400, headers, “no zurl specified” ]
    query = req[‘query’] or return [ 400, headers, “no query specified” ]
    syntax = req[‘syntax’] or return [ 400, headers, “no syntax specified” ]
    maxrecs = req[‘maxrecs’] ? Integer(req[‘maxrecs’]) : 10

    res = [] 
     res << “<span class="caps">SEARCH</span> <span class="caps">PARAMETERS</span>“ 
     res << “zurl: #{zurl}” 
     res << “query: #{query}” 
     res << “syntax: #{syntax}” 
     res << “maxrecs: #{maxrecs}” 
     res << ” 

     <span class="caps">ZOOM</span>::Connection.open(zurl) do |conn| 
       conn.preferred_record_syntax = syntax 
       rset = conn.search(query) res << “Showing #{maxrecs} of #{rset.size}” << ” 
       [ maxrecs, rset.size ].min.times { |i| res << String(rset[i]) << ” } 
     end 

    [ 200, headers, res.map { |line| line + “\n” } ] 
   end 
end 

app = Rack::<span class="caps">URLM</span>ap.new(‘/zgate’  => <span 
class="caps">ZOOMC</span>lient.new) 
Thin::Server.new(nil, 12368, app).start!