Future Directions
We have a new and better version of the front-end server on the drawing
board. Resources and external commitments will govern when we'll be
able to do something real with it. Features should include greater
flexibility, greater support for access/resource control, and easy
support for Explain (possibly with Zebra as an extra database engine).
&yaz; is a BER toolkit and as such should support all protocols
out there based on that. We'd like to see running ILL applications.
It shouldn't be that hard. Another thing that would be interesting is
LDAP. Maybe a generic framework for doing IR using both LDAP and
Z39.50 transparently.
The SOAP implementation is incomplete. In the future we hope
to add more features to it. Perhaps make a WSDL/XML Schema compiler.
The authors of libxml2 are already working on XML Schema / RelaxNG
compilers so this may not be too hard.
It would be neat to have a proper module mechanism for the Generic
Frontend Server so that backend would be dynamically
loaded (as shared objects / DLLs).
Other than that, &yaz; generally moves in the directions which appear to
make the most people happy (including ourselves, as prime users of the
software). If there's something you'd like to see in here, then drop
us a note and let's see what we can come up with.