Omri Gerson from Ex Libris is now talking about web services and the Ex Libris approach. To start with he is covering defining Web services, covering some of the ground that Mark already covered.

Omri is more taking the approach that we need to see standards developed for Ex Libris to adhere to. So – once you have ZING, you can support the relevant web services.

Currently, where these standards don’t exist, the only option is to do ad hoc services (although perhaps the other option is to define standards?)

For Aleph 18.01, Ex L will implement a SOAP wrapper on the x-server and describe all services using WSDL – hooray!. They are also comitting to not changing the structure or scope of the existing services – also hooray (had problems with this in the last upgrade!)

There is also the intention to establish an x-server focus group to help develop x-services and determine their scope.