Page History

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):

• Anja Le Blanc, University of Manchester
• Reinhard Engels, Harvard University
• William McKinney, Harvard University
• Hardy Pottinger, University of Missouri Library Systems
• Peter Dietz, Ohio State University

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

• Harvard's attempt to make a "developer-friendly" API for javascript widgets: http://50.116.59.51:8080/api/docs/v2/index.html
• Jorum (Manchester) designed a new user interface to their DSpace instance using ElasticSearch and the REST-API http://beta.jorum.ac.uk/find (still in Beta - so might not always be alive)

Production Level Examples

• Monash University Pharmacy Faculty Saber project http://saber.monash.edu/ utilising Wijiti REST API version and Joomla with JSpace connector.