[ILUG] What language?

[Timothy Murphy]

On Monday 05 February 2007 11:09, Gareth 'bigbro' Eason wrote:

> 	Timothy,
>
> 	As I hope you will have now realised, there is no answer to the
> question you asked: all you are getting is various people posting
> various development tools, languages and paradigms to the thread. While
> one of them may grab your fancy and scratch your particular itch, it's
> only by the virtue of weight of numbers and random luck.

Actually, I found the replies quite useful;
in particular the idea of using DHTML/Ajax
had not really occurred to me,
and is the solution I settled on.
So the question turned out quite fruitful in my case.

> 	Apropos the current question, perhaps you could contribute back to the
> list with some of your perceived requirements at this point in time -
> and then revise this list and let us know how you get on with whatever
> development technology you do choose. This could provide valuable
> insight for someone at risk of asking the same question in the future,
> perhaps :-)

Here is the precise application - any solutions gratefully received.

You can get a complete bibliographic entry for a book
from the Library of Congress by sending the ISBN number.
The information is returned in MARC (or MARCXML) format.
Here is a command that might work:

zoomsh "connect z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager" "search @attr 1=7 1565928628" 
"set preferredRecordSyntax marc" "show 0 1" quit

[send as one line - substitute xml for marc to get result in MARCXML format]
Here the ISBN number is 156592862.
The MARC format is pretty obvious.
There are a large number of possible fields (and sub-fields)
labelled by numbers corresponding to  Author(s), Title, Publisher, etc.

What I would like is a GUI program 
which asks in one window for the ISBN number
and then analyses the data returned
and gives the main items Author(s) etc in reasonably neat format.




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland