Peter writes to oss4lib-list: "After a bit of a pause the development ball at Avanti is rolling again. Version 0.3.1 is
released. This adds the simple but important capability of batch processing via scripting. It is now possible to run script files that process circulation activity in non-real time, set up and load data into the database and do other things better done in batch mode. Work continues on developing a lightweight native DBMS which is planned to be included in release 0.4.

For more information go to the Avanti website." Lots of momentum here following Peter's great talk at the LITA session.

Peter Schlumpf writes in about Avanti, a java-based project aimed at generating an open source API for automation systems (java APIs are fairly easily bound to other languages..., no?). A description is up, and Peter promises sanitized code within a few days.

Peter says "new classes in version 0.1.1 are SaveQueues.java and ObjectPool.java" and a tar file is available at the Avanti site.

Peter says: "Avanti version 0.1.3 has been released. This version allows the creation and management of multiple independent circulation systems, fixes a few bugs and includes improvements in the help command and code comments. Work is continuing on version 0.2 that will include an ARMS package. For more info. or to download the code go to www.nslsilus.org/~schlumpf/avanti.

Peter says about the release of Avanti-0.2: "Version 0.2 includes a new package that implements the abstract relationship modeling system (ARMS), a core component of Avanti. An ARMS is an information system that can be used to map and manipulate
relationships between a set of objects of various types (for example, a set of URL's, websites, text files, records in disparate databases, etc.).

from Peter: 'Version 0.2.1 adds the ability to define "token descriptors" for token objects in an abstract relationship modeling system (ARMS). Token descriptors are used to link token objects in an ARMS database to things in the outside world or as descriptive labels for token objects.' available to all at the Avanti site.

jake is now much faster, includes many more databases, and also enables article searching. if you add volume/issue/page/date information when looking for an article, jake will create urls to that article within various databases which enable such url linking. jake is also now under cvs control.

according to Peter: "Version 0.3 is a complete rewrite of the Avanti code base after a rethinking of the basic architecture and design. The result is the beginnings of a simple, highly modular and scalable client/server architecture using its own native messaging protocol for client/server communication." For more, see the Avanti site or you can telnet to the live demo to try it out.

seen on many lists recently is XMLMARC, a "Java client/server program [which] converts MARC to XML based on flexible maps and simplified, yet detailed DTDs for bibliographic and authorities formats." Its license is free for non-commercial use but requires consent for redistribution, and their broader experiment is described here. They seem to be aware of MARC.pm... it would be great to see a side-by-side feature comparison of the two.

DubMed has migrated to a better server. Its database is now mySql and php3 does the metadata linking instead of corba (now gone). see cvsweb for the code, and the project page for more info.