2

Hi I am a college student and a newbie in web service. I did some research about web services however, and I am going to add a web service to some websites in my institute to integrate data from them. Since they are various CMS (like I mentioned in the title), I need info about them.

What I ask about is the features, advantages and disadvantages (and maybe the requirements needed) about web services in each of the CMS (DSpace, Moodle, EPrints, WordPress, Joomla, Open Journal System)... for example, if I’m not mistaken, WordPress provides web services like RSS. Do the others provide it too?

Sorry for the vague question, but I really have no idea - especially about DSpace, Moodle, OJS and EPrints - any information would be helpful.

wxs
  • 288
  • 3
  • 18
Nathan Manullang
  • 33
  • 6
  • What type of data would you like to get? Posts, articles? Quizzes? Pictures? Users? – franzlorenzon Mar 20 '13 at 14:56
  • i am going to get posts, articles from the web service on each web, then make a kind of search engine. That's the final destination. That's why i have to know about web services within those CMS. :) – Nathan Manullang Mar 25 '13 at 13:20

2 Answers2

3

Web services (which can be SOAP or REST based), you may call them also APIs, have little to do with RSS feeds (from my point of view).

Web services generally will provide an interface and exchange data. How they are implemented behind the interface they expose, it's not relevant to the client.

Wikipedia defines web services as a "software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network." As implementation they are more complex than RSS feeds and are usually used to integrate business applications (like connecting an ERP with a CRM system).

On the RSS part, all decent CMS should have RSS available (in a form or another) generally for sharing content.

From my knowledge Joomla! don't have any web services implementation (Joomla! is working on a draft document as we speak). Wordpress has XML-RPC Support.

So it's kind of important to understand what does "data" mean. Do you strictly refer to content (like articles, blog posts) or do you want to exchange other data as well (for example user data or other data stored in the CMS tables).

So to kind of answer your question, to integrate articles from all CMS probably using RSS feeds will be enough.

Valentin Despa
  • 40,712
  • 18
  • 80
  • 106
  • thanks for the answer, as you said all decent CMS should have RSS available, but some dont. And i need information about web services in some -unknown CMS for me- like DSpace, Eprints, Open Journal System. Do they have RSS/API available? The data i was talking about is like Articles, Posts. :) – Nathan Manullang Mar 25 '13 at 13:41
  • 1
    You need to check each project page, do some search, ask. It shouldn't be so hard to find it, like DSpace for example https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Configure+RSS+feeds – Valentin Despa Mar 25 '13 at 13:52
1

DSpace started life as an institutional repository software and is trending toward a more general digital asset manager. It really emphasizes preservation (checksums, auditing, item level versioning) and descriptive information of the content it handles. It generally handles any file equally well: a WARC, MPEG, TIFF, MS Office, etc., but it isn't really focused on web publishing of that content, but simply online access to and download of it.

There's an independent REST API for it, and it comes with SWORD support. Content can be published in an RSS feed - I don't know if DSpace has any functionality for importing content that way.

My first instinct is to say this isn't what you're looking for. DSpace is focused on long-term retention, organization and access to content, not so much quick (or automated) aggregation of content from online sources.

wxs
  • 288
  • 3
  • 18
  • Wow, really thanks for the answer. The [SWORD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWORD_%28protocol%29) link also explains some information about EPrints and Open Journal System which i needed too. Please share if you have more information or experience about them (web services in the CMS i mentioned), thx :) – Nathan Manullang Mar 25 '13 at 16:58
  • DSpace 4.0 adds support for a READ-ONLY REST API. Thus you can provide programmatic access to your Communities, Collections, Items, and Bitstreams. (i.e. another application could be built to scoop up all of your content, or to do real time requests to show data). – Peter Dietz Jan 05 '14 at 04:14