The University of Edinburgh's Discovery+ apparently eschews a SOAP/WSDL Web services model for in favour of the much simpler REST protocol. Interestingly, they are also piloting an implementation of the relatively new IMS Resource List Interoperability specification. For those interested in the REST versus SOAP view of Web services, Paul Prescod's 2002 article Second Generation Web Services is still a worthy read. The quick and dirty explanation of REST is that the service request is embedded within the URI.
But let's see how Discovery+ puts the REST protocol to work.
To have the response to a service request results returned in IMS RLI the normal Discovery+ REST URI would change from:
“http://tweed.lib.ed.ac.uk:8080/elf/search/edinburgh?operation=searchRetrieve&query=”e-learning”&maximumRecords=5”
“http://tweed.lib.ed.ac.uk:8080/elf/search/edinburghrli?operation=searchRetrieve&query=”e-learning”&maximumRecords=5” (note the 'rli' appended to the base url).
As with all Web services a mass of human unfriendly XML data is returned which the client application has to makes sense of.
