There will be a Tutorial offered in conjunction with the October 2001 ZIG Meeting.
Date: Tuesday, October 2 Time: 9:30-5:30
Organized by: Sebastian Hammer
Presented by:
Sebastian Hammer
Mike Taylor
Ian Ibbotson
Bill Moen
Lunch Provided by: fretwell-downing
Description
The tutorial will stress pragmatic issues and try to counter
the "Z39.50 is hard" perceptions by showing how easy it actually can be. It
will focusing on interoperability and profiling in real-life applications, and
concrete introductions to existing freeware APIs in different languages.
It will probably not address the details of ASN.1 to the same
level as earlier tutorials but rather in a more summary fashion, if at all --
this tutorial is not aimed at people who want to build new low-level toolkits
(the theory being that there are already several, and that the sort of people
who are likely to want to write new ones will not be coming to the ZIG tutorial
to find out how). Rather, the emphasis will be how to build Z39.50 client applications
using an Object-Oriented API (for which bindings exist to two languages with more
to come), hopefully showing how "easy things are made easy, but hard things are
possible".
The focus is on easy ways to deploy Z39.50, much as web tutorials tend
to focus much more on how HTTP can be deployed to solve real problems rather
than on how to converse with (or build) an HTTP server.
Most of the early part of the day will cover general Z39.50 issues -- introducing
the protocol, implementation experience, possibly profiles, with little mention
of ASN.1, because we don't think that is relevant to understanding the protocol,
and emphasis on concrete, real-life experiences and problems at the semantic
and user level.
Next, more about how to Z39.50 it in practice, starting from things requiring
zero programming experience, and then moving into the more sophisticated tools.
People with no interest in programming whatsoever are excused when the funk
gets too thick. Focus will be on freeware tools that anyone can go home and
download and play with after the tutorial. Our hope is that both programmers
and untechnincal to semi-technical people will go away with something useful.
Summary List of topics:
Who should attend
The introductory sections will be suitable for anyone from librarians and managers
to programmers trying to get a first grip on what Z39.50 is all about. We will
attempt to ease into the technical part of the tutorial in such a way that it
will remain of interest to anyone. The focus on the last half of the tutorial
will be on the flavor and strengths/weaknesses of different development environments,
rather than a rigorous walk-through of every single feature.
Other reason to attend: Mike Taylor will provide free
chocolate!
Library
of Congress