If you're brand new to the project and want the broadest overview, please see the official Web site.

In short, Akara is a platform for developing data-driven Web APIs. It's sometimes whimsically called "pampered chef for data."

Akara (downloads here) is an open-source (Apache2 license) Web framework specialized for RESTful data services, especially involving XML and other semi-structured formats. You express data models and create transforms based on these data models, plugging required inputs and outputs (XML, JSON, CSV, Atom, etc.) together into pipelines which implement the desired services. You then make these services available on the Web using simple wrappers. The wrappers are based on REST concepts and among other things make it easy to discover and reuse the services, and to connect them to local and remote systems using Web triggers (AKA Web hooks).

Akara simplifies extract-transform-load (ETL), data-driven integration of systems, and makes it easy to snap together jigsaw pieces from the Web, turning tag soup and messy APIs into clean, RESTful end-points.

For the most part Akara is enabling technology for developers and technical users. Others will generally gain the benefits of Akara through simplified data feeds to end-user sites based on more general-purpose frameworks such as Pinax. (See Zepheira Freemix for one example of this combination).

For a fun demonstration, check out this screencast by Eric Miller of interactive data augmentation work we've recently launched for the Library of Congress (an internal project so far, but hopefully to be public this year). Beyond the user interface, is cool and all, but Akara does all the heavy lifting from the data perspective, as a detached service invoked RESTfully.

Screencast: data augmentation on the US Library of Congress recollection platform, powered by Akara

Or just go ahead and get started : Akara/Install

Discuss Akara on the Akara mailing list.

Issue tracker: https://github.com/zepheira/akara/issues

There are a couple of persistent links for the Akara project: http://purl.org/xml3k/akara and http://x.ogbuji.net/akara

Components

Akara is an umbrella project that includes Amara 2.0 (Amara) as a layer for core XML processing and data utilities. It then provides a layer of wrappers that mount functions as simple REST end-points.

Development

See: Akara/Developer_notes

There is a mailing list for developers as well.

Background

See: Akara/Background

Issue tracker: https://github.com/zepheira/akara/issues

etc.

Akara (last edited 2011-05-05 15:16:19 by UcheOgbuji)