Web service in CMS such as DSpace, Moodle, EPrints, WordPress, Joomla, Open Journal System?

Question

Hi I am a college student and a newbie in web service. I did some research about web services however, and I am going to add a web service to some websites in my institute to integrate data from them. Since they are various CMS (like I mentioned in the title), I need info about them.

What I ask about is the features, advantages and disadvantages (and maybe the requirements needed) about web services in each of the CMS (DSpace, Moodle, EPrints, WordPress, Joomla, Open Journal System)... for example, if I’m not mistaken, WordPress provides web services like RSS. Do the others provide it too?

Sorry for the vague question, but I really have no idea - especially about DSpace, Moodle, OJS and EPrints - any information would be helpful.

Answer 1

Web services (which can be SOAP or REST based), you may call them also APIs, have little to do with RSS feeds (from my point of view).

Web services generally will provide an interface and exchange data. How they are implemented behind the interface they expose, it's not relevant to the client.

Wikipedia defines web services as a "software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network." As implementation they are more complex than RSS feeds and are usually used to integrate business applications (like connecting an ERP with a CRM system).

On the RSS part, all decent CMS should have RSS available (in a form or another) generally for sharing content.

From my knowledge Joomla! don't have any web services implementation (Joomla! is working on a draft document as we speak). Wordpress has XML-RPC Support.

So it's kind of important to understand what does "data" mean. Do you strictly refer to content (like articles, blog posts) or do you want to exchange other data as well (for example user data or other data stored in the CMS tables).

So to kind of answer your question, to integrate articles from all CMS probably using RSS feeds will be enough.

Answer 2

DSpace started life as an institutional repository software and is trending toward a more general digital asset manager. It really emphasizes preservation (checksums, auditing, item level versioning) and descriptive information of the content it handles. It generally handles any file equally well: a WARC, MPEG, TIFF, MS Office, etc., but it isn't really focused on web publishing of that content, but simply online access to and download of it.

There's an independent REST API for it, and it comes with SWORD support. Content can be published in an RSS feed - I don't know if DSpace has any functionality for importing content that way.

My first instinct is to say this isn't what you're looking for. DSpace is focused on long-term retention, organization and access to content, not so much quick (or automated) aggregation of content from online sources.