What Designers of a Protocol can learn from OAI-PMH

July 12, 2009 at 5:35 pm | Posted in cgi, programming | 1 Comment

I spent the last couple of days writing an OAI-PMH data provider (two, actually). And to give a positive twist to the things that bothered me about OAI-PMH, I’ll list them as “things not to do in a protocol”:

• additional arguments are not ignored but are to be handled as error.

  This leads to a lot of additional code just to make sure a data provider is compliant. But for a different OAI-PMH data provider I wrote before it was even worse: I had one data provider serving different repositories, but I couldn’t simply add an additional URL parameter to the base URL to distinguish these.

• HTTP is just used as transport layer.

  An error response in OAI-PMH is not an HTTP reponse with a status != 200, but rather an XML error message delivered with HTTP 200. This means more programming work on both server and client side.

• noRecordsMatch error message instead of delivering an empty list.

  Again this means more work on the data provider side – but also for most harvesters i assume. Additionally, since this error can only be detected after running some logic on the server, it is hard to just implement one check_args routine, which is called before any other action and then only handle the success case.

• The resumption token.

  The flow control mechanism of OAI-PMH is way too specific. It’s completely geared towards stateful data providers. Imagine your resources live in an SQL database; what you’d do to retrieve them in batches is using simple LIMIT and OFFSET settings. But you can’t just put the offset in the resumption token, becaue it is an exclusive argument, i.e. with the next request from the client, you will receive only the resumption token, but none of the other arguments supplied before. So what the typical CGI programmer ends up with is embedding all other arguments in the resumption token, and upon the next request, parsing the resumption token to reconsruct the complete request.

So if you are about to design a protocol on top of HTTP learn from the mistakes of OAI-PMH.

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