WebVoyáge Enhancer Ere Maijala The National Library of Finland Voyager Developer meets Developer 2010

Why? Tomcat WebVoyáge is flexible in some ways, not so much in others Need to get to tweak the OPAC in a very deep way

Basics A perl daemon Talks AJPv13 protocol with Apache and Tomcat – Sits between them and intercepts requests and responses Modular – Most functionality provided by plugins Utility class provides helper functions

Diagram of the Data Flow ApacheTomcat Web Browser Without WebVoyáge Enhancer: ApacheTomcat Web Browser With WebVoyáge Enhancer: WebVoyáge Enhancer 30007

Possibilities Modify HTML content returned from Tomcat (postprocessing) Craft custom responses without accessing Tomcat at all (preprosessing) Fetch data from the database, other sources Reuse connections, cache database connection

Limitations No magic – E.g. Can’t get patron id if it doesn’t exist in the html – There’s code to grab and store the patron id upon login, though No multipage operations without going through great hurdles No things that take too much time – E.g. AJAX may be better suited for some cases

Current Functionality Built-in: Easy text replacements – String to string – Regular expressions Extended OpenURL creation Reference Management functions (export) – HTML lists – RefWorks Export – MarcXML – IMS Packages for virtual learning environments Open all external links in a new window Show a condensed summary of holdings Extend patron account information

In Practice… Installation Apache configuration Language tag in HTML (optional) Configuration Plugins Logging XSL Files

TODO More plugins! – Need feedback to know what is needed Testing in a production environment

Thanks!