Gazelle

Overview

Gazelle (for Generalized Z39.50 Layer) is a toolkit for building Z39.50 services on top of legacy databases. It provides the code for managing connections to Z39.50 clients and decoding Z39.50 protocol data units. All that's left to the user is to add code to perform the low-level step of accessing the legacy database.

Gazelle can provide a quick on-ramp to Z39.50 for a variety of different data providers. A skeletal prototype of Gazelle called "Pizzazzd" is being experimentally deployed as a interoperability service layer for astronomy data in NASA Project 30.

Projected features include a set of tools for adding Z39.50 access points to SQL databases, including configuration-driven schema mapping tools, result caching, and result record formatting.

Features

• Highly portable ANSI C code
• Works with any Z39.50 client
• Profile-netural (does not have BIB1 attribute set hard-coded into it)
• Supports a subset of Z39.50
• Provides tools for constructing and interpreting Z39.50 protocol messages
• Provides a simple plug-in API for building search services

Browse the Gazelle documentation.