PHP

Yesterday, just one day before the anniversary of the 1.1.2 release, I published the 1.1.3 release of the PEAR File_MARC library. The only change is the addition of a convenience method for fields called getContents() that simply concatenates all of the subfields together in order, with an optional separator string. Many thanks to Carsten Klee for contributing the code!

You can install File_MARC through the usual channels: PEAR or composer. Have fun!

Tuesday was not the greatest day, but at least each setback resulted in a triumph...

First, the periodical proposal for schema.org--that I have poured a good couple of months of effort into--took a step closer to reality when Dan Brickley announced on the public-vocabs list that he had created a test build that incorporated the RDFS that I had written up. Excitement rapidly turned to horror, though, as I realized that I had made a classic copy/paste error, in which I had changed the displayed name of the domainIncludes value but had not changed the actual URI... Long story short, the test build looked nothing like what the schemabibex group had agreed on, and I was terribly embarrassed.

Luckily, after I fixed the RDFS, Dan was able to put together a revised test build later that day that actually reflected our intentions. So that can continue moving forward...

Second, our Evergreen instance started acting up rather badly. All of the connections to the database server were being gobbled up, and we were scrambling to figure out why. While I'm on sabbatical I'm not really supposed to be involved in the day-to-day operations, but when a core service stops running it's okay for research to wait for a little bit... Eventually I tracked down a fix for a potential denial of service problem (Search result rendering can crush the system) that hadn't been merged into our production system (the fix came out after the start of my sabbatical), and shortly after I put that into production we were back up and running.

Third, after the Evergreen problem was resolved, Bill Dueber pinged me innocently on IRC. He had run into a problem with File_MARC; when serializing MARC as MARC-in-JSON format, fields with a subfield $0 were getting trashed. Data corrupting bugs are one of the most serious classes of bugs for any package maintainer, so I jumped on this problem too... After a little bit of analysis, I figured out that PHP's type coercion for integer-like keys when creating arrays and its json_encode() implementation were combining to ruin the MARC-in-JSON serialization in this one particular case. Faced with rewriting the entire serialization logic, I did what any (in)sane programmer would and ended up running a regex against the result of json_encode() to turn the array-ified subfield $0 back into a key/value pair. File_MARC 1.1.1 is now available at your nearest PEAR mirror...

Way back in 2006, I thought "It's a shame there is no PHP library for parsing MARC records!", and given that much of my most recent coding experience was in the PHP realm, I thought it would be a good way of contributing to the world of code4lib. Thus File_MARC was born in October 2006. At the time, I had aspirations of quickly iterating to a 1.0.0 stable release. Hah!

Seven years later, I have finally cut a 1.0.0 stable release of the File_MARC library for PHP. The major reason I had been hesitating was that I really wanted to cut over to the native SplDoublyLinkedList class instead of my own user-space linked list. In the end, I still had to add a small shim to enable nodes to be inserted anywhere in the linked list (SplDoublyLinkedList::add() was not added to PHP until 5.5.0, to which few users will have easy access for a while), but I'm much happier about the result.

The best thing about this release is that it means you no longer have to add -beta to your install command, which tripped many people up, I'm sure. That is, you can simply install it with:

pear install File_MARC

Thanks to Bill Dueber and Ross Singer for pestering me to go ahead and get this thing stable, and to Demian Katz and Mark Jordan for testing out the final code!

I've just released the PHP PEAR library File_MARC 0.6.0. This release brings two JSON serialization output methods for MARC to the table:

• toJSONHash() returns JSON that adheres to Bill Dueber's proposal for the array-oriented MARC-HASH JSON format at New interest in MARC-HASH JSON
• toJSON() returns JSON that adheres to Ross Singer's proposal for an object-oriented JSON format (I could only find a sample at this paste - not sure if there's a broader description anywhere, but really -- who needs it?)

The JSON formats should be useful for developers who don't want to have to deal with the overhead and sluggishness of a MARC parsing library (yes, File_MARC, I'm looking at you) just to deal with MARC data. Both formats are round-trippable and compact, which is why I chose to support them.

The use of the json_encode() function bumps the minimum PHP version requirement for File_MARC up to 5.2.x from 5.1.x, which kind of sucks, but given that PHP 5.2.0 was released in 2006, I think it's worth it.

You can install File_MARC using the 'pear' command on most environments as follows:

pear install File_MARC-beta