MediaShelf Blog

In addition to presenting on How We Integrated Fedora into Ruby On Rails, and How You Can Use It, I will now be giving a second talk at the JA-SIG Conference in late April. The second presentation is titled How we created a REST API for Fedora, Why we did it, and What it gives you. Here is the abstract:

The latest release of Fedora contains a new experimental RESTful API. MediaShelf created this API and contributed it to Fedora Commons in 2007. Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf’s lead software architect, will present this API and its features. He will explain how it works, why we designed it, and how you can take advantage of this convenient interface.

The new REST API is included in Fedora 3.0 Beta1. You can download a copy of Fedora from the Fedora Commons website.

I will be presenting on How We Integrated Fedora into Ruby on Rails, and How You Can Use It at two conferences this spring. You can see the talk at OpenRepositories in Southampton, England on 03 April or at the JA-SIG Conference in Minneapolis, MN on 28 April. Here’s the abstract:

Breathe a sigh of relief, and let yourself daydream a bit. Developing Fedora-centric applications just became a lot easier.

MediaShelf (http://yourmediashelf.com) has created software libraries that allow developers to treat Fedora repository content as Ruby objects. Even better, we have made it so you can use these objects natively within Ruby on Rails. Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf’s Lead Architect, will demonstrate how this graceful union was achieved.

Matt will start by reviewing Ruby on Rails fundamentals and showing how the new RubyFedora and ActiveRepository libraries fit into Rails. He will then walk you through a simple Rails application that uses these libraries. The session will conclude with a look at some of the underlying code and a discussion of the current development status for this work.

We will be putting out a pre-release of the RubyFedora and ActiveRepository libraries in conjunction with these presentations.

The other week I was interviewed by Carol Minton Morris from Fedora Commons.  She was assembling the first issue of the Fedora Commons HatCheck Newsletter.  You can read the entire interview on the Fedora Commons website.

In the interview, I talk about the people who I’ve interviewed so far on my Listening Tour.  Alas, I haven’t had a chance to post my accounts of those interviews yet.  I hope to post at least two of them before OpenRepositories (1-4 April), so watch this space.