1 BUILDING A SIMPLE HTTP-TO-Z3950 GATEWAY USING YAZ4J AND TOMCAT
2 ==============================================================
4 [Yaz4J](http://www.indexdata.com/yaz4j) is a wrapper library over the
5 client-specific parts of YAZ, a C-based Z39.50 toolkit, and allows you to use
6 the ZOOM API directly from Java. Initial version of Yaz4j has been written
7 by Rob Styles from [Talis](http://www.talis.com) and the project is now
8 developed and maintained at IndexData.
9 [ZOOM](http://zoom.z3950.org/api/zoom-1.4.html) is a relatively straightforward
10 API and with a few lines of code you can write a basic application that can
11 establish connection to a Z39.50 server.
12 Here we will try to build a very simple HTTP-to-Z3950 gateway using yaz4j and
13 the Java Servlet technology.
15 ### COMPILING AND INSTALLING YAZ4J
17 Yaz4j is still an experimental piece of software and as such is not distributed
18 via Index Data's public Debian Apt repository and there is no Windows build (yet)
19 either. While it is possible to use the pre-built Linux binaries, users of
20 other OSes will have to compile yaz4j from source. No need to worry (yet) - the
21 process of compiling yaz4j is quite simple and we will be up and running in no
24 As a prerequisite, to complete th build process you will need JDK, Maven, Swig
25 and Yaz (development package) installed on your machine. On Debian/Ubuntu you
26 can get those easily via apt:
28 apt-get install sun-java6-jdk maven2 libyaz4-dev swig
31 The Yaz4j's source code can be checked-out out from our
32 [Git repository](http://git.indexdata.com/?p=yaz4j.git;a=summary), and assuming
33 you have Git installed on your machine you can do that with:
35 git clone git://git.indexdata.com/yaz4j
37 The compilation of both native and Java source code is controlled by Maven2,
38 to build the library, invoke the following commands:
43 That's it. If the build has completed successfully you end up with two files:
44 os-independent jar archive with Java ZOOM API classes
45 (yaz4j/any/target/yaz4j-any-VERSION.jar) and os-dependent shared library
46 (yaz4j/linux/target/libyaz4j.so or yaz4j/win32/target/yaz4j.dll) that contains
47 all necessary JNI "glue" to make the native calls possible from Java. If we were
48 writing a command line Java application, like any other external Java library,
49 yaz4j-any-VERSION.jar would have to be placed on your application classpath
50 and the native, shared library would have to be added to your system shared
51 library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH on linux, PATH on Windows) or specified as a
52 Java system property (namely the java.library.path) just before your
53 application is executed:
55 java -cp /path/to/yaz4j-*.jar -Djava.library.path=/path/to/libyaz4j.so MyApp
57 ### SETTING UP THE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
59 Setting up a development/runtime environment for a web (servlet) application is
60 a bit more complicated. First, you are not invoking the JVM directly, but the
61 servlet container (e.g Tomcat) run-script is doing that for you. At this
62 point the shared library (so or dll) has to be placed on the servlet container's
63 shared libraries load path. Unless your library is deployed to the standard
64 system location for shared libs (`/usr/lib` on Linux) or it's location is
65 already added to the path, the easiest way to do this in Tomcat is by editing
66 (create it if it does not exist) the `CATALINA_HOME/bin/setenv.sh` (setenv.bat
67 on Windows) script and putting the following lines in there:
69 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/path/to/libyaz4j.so
70 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
72 on Windows (though no Windows build is yet provided)
74 set PATH=%PATH;X:\path\to\yaz4j.dll
76 That's one way of doing it, another would be to alter the standard set of
77 arguments passed to the JVM before the Tomcat starts and add
78 `-Djava.library.path=/path/to/lib there`. Depending on a situation this might
79 be preferable/easier (on Debian/Ubuntu you can specify JVM arguments in the
80 `/etc/default/tomcat6` file).
82 With the shared library installed we need to install the pure-Java yaz4j-any*jar
83 with ZOOM API classes by placing it in Tomcat's `lib` directory
84 (CATALINA_HOME/lib). As this library makes the Java System call to load the
85 native library into the JVM you cannot simply package it along with your web
86 application (inside the .war file) - it would try to load the library each time
87 you deploy the webapp and all consecutive deployments would fail.
89 ### WRITING A SERVLET-BASED GATEWAY
91 With your servlet environment set up all that is left is to write the actual
92 application (peanuts :)). At IndexData we use Maven for managing builds of our
93 Java software components but Maven is also a great tool for quickly starting up
94 a project. To generate a skeleton for our webapp use the Maven archetype plugin:
96 mvn -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.1 -Darchetype.interactive=false \
97 -DarchetypeArtifactId=webapp-jee5 -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo.archetypes \
98 -Dpackage=com.indexdata.zgate -DgroupId=com.indexdata -DartifactId=zgate \
99 archetype:generate --batch-mode
101 This will generate a basic webapp project structure:
124 Maven has already added basic JEE APIs for web development as the project
125 dependencies, we need to do the same for yaz4j, so edit the `pom.xml` and
126 add the following lines in the `dependencies` section:
128 <blockcode type="xml">
131 <groupId>org.yaz4j</groupId>
132 <artifactId>yaz4j-any</artifactId>
133 <version>VERSION</version>
134 <scope>provided</scope>
139 It's crucial that the scope of this dependency is set to `provided` otherwise
140 the library would end up packaged in the .war archive and we don't want that.
142 The implementation of our simple gateway will be contained in a single servlet -
143 `ZGateServlet` - which we need to place under `src/main/webapp/com/indexdata/zgate.`
144 The gateway will work by answering HTTP GET requests and will be controlled
145 solely by HTTP parameters, the servlet doGet method is shown below:
147 <blockcode type="java">
149 protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
150 throws ServletException, IOException {
151 String zurl = request.getParameter("zurl");
152 if (zurl == null || zurl.isEmpty()) {
153 response.sendError(400, "Missing parameter 'zurl'");
157 String query = request.getParameter("query");
158 if (query == null || query.isEmpty()) {
159 response.sendError(400, "Missing parameter 'query'");
163 String syntax = request.getParameter("syntax");
164 if (syntax == null || syntax.isEmpty()) {
165 response.sendError(400, "Missing parameter 'syntax'");
170 if (request.getParameter("maxrecs") != null
171 && !request.getParameter("maxrecs").isEmpty()) {
173 maxrecs = Integer.parseInt(request.getParameter("maxrecs"));
174 } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
175 response.sendError(400, "Malformed parameter 'maxrecs'");
180 response.getWriter().println("SEARCH PARAMETERS");
181 response.getWriter().println("zurl: " + zurl);
182 response.getWriter().println("query: " + query);
183 response.getWriter().println("syntax: " + syntax);
184 response.getWriter().println("maxrecs: " + maxrecs);
185 response.getWriter().println();
187 Connection con = new Connection(zurl, 0);
188 con.setSyntax(syntax);
191 ResultSet set = con.search(query, Connection.QueryType.PrefixQuery);
192 response.getWriter().println("Showing " + maxrecs + " of "+set.getSize());
193 response.getWriter().println();
194 for(int i=0; i<set.getSize() && i<maxrecs; i++) {
195 Record rec = set.getRecord(i);
196 response.getWriter().print(rec.render());
198 } catch (ZoomException ze) {
199 throw new ServletException(ze);
207 With the code in-place we can try to compile the project:
211 If all is OK, the next step is to register our servlet and map it to an URL in
212 src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml:
214 <blockcode type="xml">
217 <servlet-name>ZgateServlet</servlet-name>
218 <servlet-class>com.indexdata.zgate.ZgateServlet</servlet-class>
221 <servlet-name>ZgateServlet</servlet-name>
222 <url-pattern>/zgate</url-pattern>
227 On top of that, we will also make sure that our servlet is automatically
228 triggered when accessing the root path of our application:
230 <blockcode type="xml">
233 <welcome-file>zgate</welcome-file>
234 <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
239 Now we are ready to build our webapp:
243 The resulting .war archive is located under `target/zgate.war`, we can deploy
244 it on tomcat (e.g by using the `/admin` Tomcat admin console) and test by
245 issuing the following request with your browser or curl
246 (assuming Tomcat is running on localhost:8080):
248 http://localhost:8080/zgate/?zurl=z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager&query=@attr%201=7%200253333490&syntax=usmarc
251 That's it! You just build yourself a HTTP-to-Z3950 gateway! Just be careful
252 with exposing it to the outside world - it's not very secure and could be
253 easily exploited. The source code and the gateway's Maven project is available
254 in the Yaz4j's Git repo under `examples/zgate`. In the meantime, IndexData
255 is working on a Debian/Ubuntu package to make the installation of Yaz4j and
256 Tomcat configuration greatly simplified - so stay tuned!. If you are interested
257 in Windows support - e.g. Visual Studio based build or an installer - please