Linde002::PHP

As I continue to try and catalog my book collection I keep hitting some walls. One of these is that ISBNdb.org catalogs mostly English editions of books and their corresponding ISBN’s. Seeing that my library is only 60-70% in english this leaves me with a lot of (dutch) editions that I cannot process using ISBNdb.org.

Luckily for me ISBNdb.org isn’t the only dealer on the block. WorldCat has their xISBN service that performs roughly the same as ISBNdb.org and they have a larger collection of ‘foreign’ editions in their database. If that doesn’t work I can use the ‘ThingISBN’ service from LibraryThing to retrieve a list of other editions for my selected book, get an english edition and then search using that ISBN. To use these in PHP i’ve created wrappers for both Services. I also migrated the documentation for ISBNDBService. Information for all of these services can be found at: http://webservices.linde002.nl/

As I have been getting a lot of questions about the functionality of ISBNDBService recently I’ve decided to upgrade the documentation somewhat. Besides the API documentation I have also compiled a small site that explains the basic behavior of the library and shows some common examples.

For a project for the PHP expertise group at Sogeti that I’m doing I’ve started to work with jQuery and the Google Maps API, something I should’ve done way earlier but I just didn’t get around to it. First of all let me say that both jQuery and the GMaps API are excellent pieces of software*,  they are both easy to implement and use and there’s tons of documentation available (something that we can’t say for all public API’s…. Yes, I’m looking at you hyves).

(more…)