[Dev] New Virtual Collection Registry alpha release

[Twan Goosen]

Dear CLARIN developers,

For those who are interested: a new ALPHA release of the Virtual 
Collection Registry (VCR) is available at 
<http://catalog-clarin.esc.rzg.mpg.de/vcr> for your viewing, 
experimenting and constructive criticising pleasure :) For the parts 
that require authentication, I have created 20 test accounts with 
usernames 'vcr-test1' to 'vcr-test20' and password 'vcr'. Take your pick :)

This version is a continuation of the work of Oliver Schonefeld of IDS 
over the last couple of years. It adds some small but crucial features, 
most importantly an endpoint for other web based tools to submit to the 
VCR; furthermore there a quite a few improvements with respect to 
stability and maintainability of the application.

As a test case, I extended the non-production version of the VLO with an 
option to submit search results to the VCR as a new collection. You can 
test this yourself by going to 
<http://catalog-clarin.esc.rzg.mpg.de/vlo/>, making a selection with at 
most 1000 results and choosing the option "Create virtual collection 
from search results" from the "Search Options" box. Doing so will prompt 
you to log in to the VCR.
This version of the VCR also fully supports Shibboleth (by means of the 
SHHAA filter), but since this test server is not Shibbolised, this 
cannot be demonstrated at this point.

Some further changes:
* The public interface of the VCR's REST service has been somewhat 
refactored; up-to-date documentation is available[1].
* Published collection now get a handle by means of the EPIC APIv2 
(currently with a test prefix, persistence not guaranteed!).
* You may also notice that the CMDI serialisations of the virtual 
collections are now based on a new profile, which currently is not 
public but can be inspected via the Component Registry's REST interface 
[2]. I expect that it will be tweaked a bit before the stable release.

As can be seen in the overview of the VCR 1.0 Milestone[3], there are 
still some remaining tasks before this version can go into production; 
most importantly the addition of some administration facilities and 
improved in-application documentation for the web front-end.
The intention is not too add any additional features to this version 
beyond those specified in this milestone. There is a plan[4] for future 
versions. However, I am very much interested in your feedback on the 
current alpha release. So please have a look and feel free to send me 
your findings and other comments. I will be on vacation for all of next 
week and most of the week after that, so I may not reply until I get 
back.  If you encounter any urgent issues (e.g. server is down) in the 
meantime, please contact Dieter about this.

Have fun!

Best regards,
Twan

[1] 
https://svn.clarin.eu/VirtualCollectionRegistry/tags/VirtualCollectionRegistry-0.4.0-alpha/VirtualCollectionRegistry/Protocol.txt
[2] 
http://catalog.clarin.eu/ds/ComponentRegistry/rest/registry/profiles/clarin.eu:cr1:p_1404130561238/xml
[3] https://trac.clarin.eu/milestone/VirtualCollectionRegistry-1.0
[4] http://www.clarin.eu/content/virtual-collection-registry-workplan

-- 
Twan Goosen
CLARIN ERIC
www.clarin.eu | tel. +31 85 0091277 | skype: twan.goosen