Month: April 2015

LODLAM Challenge Entry

I have put an entry into the 2015 LODLAM Challenge, a competition for projects doing something with Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, or Museums.

Now my entry just needs people to view it and vote for it!

corbicula-video-screenshotMy entry is for a product called Corbicula, which I mostly wrote a couple of years ago, which I am now updating for release as a web application. It’s probably a month away from its first release, at least, but in the meantime, it’s still possible to VOTE FOR ME by clicking the “like” button.

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Long running and asynchronous processes in XProc-Z

I added a useful feature to my web server framework XProc-Z, to allow it to run processes that take a long time – longer than the lifetime of an HTTP request.

Specifically, I had in mind running OAI-PMH harvests, in which a harvester may need to run for hours and make hundreds or thousands of HTTP requests of its own, in order to download a large set of metadata records. But any long running process faces the same issue: if a person makes a request to initiate a long running process, using a web browser, the server can’t afford to wait until the process is complete before it responds, because the user’s HTTP request will time out. Instead, the server needs to return a response to say “process has started…” and then to continue the processing in the background.
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