bento_search is a ruby gem that provides standardized ruby API and other support for querying external search engines with HTTP API’s, retrieving results, and displaying them in Rails. It’s focused on search engines that return scholarly articles or citations.
I just released version 1.4.
The main new feature is a round-trippable JSON serialization of any BentoSearch::Results or Items. This serialization captures internal state, suitable for a round-trip, such that if you’ve changed configuration related to an engine between dump and load, you get the new configuration after load. It’s main use case is a consumer that is also ruby software using bento_search. It is not really suitable for use as an API for external clients, since it doesn’t capture full semantics, but just internal state sufficient to restore to a ruby object with full semantics. (bento_search does already provide a tool that supports an Atom serialization intended for external client API use).
It’s interesting that once you start getting into serialization, you realize there’s no one true serialization, it depends on the use cases of the serialization. I needed a serialization that really was just of internal state, for a round trip back to ruby.
bento_search 1.4 also includes some improvements to make the specialty JournalTocsForJournal adapter a bit more robust. I am working on an implementation of JournalTocs featching that needed the JSON round-trippable serialization too, for an Umlaut plug-in. Stay tuned.
Bibliographic Wilderness 