[Isis-users] J-ISIS functionalities

[roberto.sturman at ts.infn.it]

Dear Jean-Claude & dear ISIS discussion list subscribers,

I installed the J-ISIS (version Dec 2010) and played with it. Its very
innovative approach, using an external database storage and indexing and
preserving the ISIS core features (ISO 2709 fields+subfields, repeatible
tags, the formatting language capabilities, etc.) and thus allowing to
overcome some limitations of the other ISIS implementations (see below),
makes it in my opinion an value-added member of the ISIS software family.
Congratulations to Jean-Claude Dauphin for his conceptual and coding work!

About the functionalities, what is in my opinion missing in this software
(as well in other ISIS "members" like the abandoned WINSIS), is the lack
of a FORMATTED listing as the initial way of displaying data of a database
sets (sets of recs by MFN range, by search results, by previously marked
and saved records, etc.), allowing users to select one or more records for
subseqential full display, editing, export, etc. Despite J-ISIS clearly
represents a great step forward to some traditional ISIS family
limitations, like the new dictionary unlimited key length and UNICODE
support, just to mention some, I think that the above mentioned feature
(formatted listing) would be essential and should be considered as the
main way of displaying records for subsequential selection. The browsing
of single records of a database set can be a very time consuming task for
the user in the case of large number of results.  In my opinion this is
the STANDARD way the final users expect to get the records from a
database. It is true that JISIS currently supports the record listing, but
just as an UNFORMATTED table, typical of spreadsheet programs and moreover
JUST to edit the raw record data. It is also true that being JISIS an open
source project, it allows to modify the source code, but I am speaking
about the basic, standard features, that im my opinion should the coded in
the core package.

Is there any plans to implement this feature in the near future?

Just one more question. Is WEB-JISIS just a porting of the JISIS, or is it
a derivate work, implying additional coding?

Best regards and once again again congratulations to the author for his
great job,

roberto sturman,
librarian


P.S. Best wishes for a happy new year!