Storming the web!!!

OJAX is the new open-source federated search tool.It provides a highly dynamic AJAX based user interface to a federated search service for OAI-PMH compatible repository metadata.

OJAX is simple, non-threatening but powerful. It attempts to minimise upfront user investment and provide immediate dynamic feedback, thus encouraging experimentation and enabling enactive learning.

Benefits of OJAX

• Provide a single search interface across all the repositories in use in an institution or consortium.
• Or provide an improved search interface to a single repository
• Faster resource discovery.
• Easy to use, and support.

Features of OJAX

• Auto-completion of search terms
• Triggering of auto-searches
• Dynamically scrollable search results – no more navigating between pages
• Auto-expansion of search result details
• Rapid sorting of results
• Integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature
• Supports OpenSearch Discovery
• Stored searches as Atom feeds
• Includes an OAI-PMH harvester
• Easy to install in your own institution

Installation 

OJAX can be installed as a Web Application in any J2EE compliant servlet engine.

Packages Available

1. OJAX GUI, Web Services & Harvester
2. OJAX GUI, Web Services, Harvester & example repository index

People behind it

• Dr. Judith Wusteman
• Pádraig O’hIceadha

This software was developed by UCD School of Information and Library Studies, Dublin, Ireland, with collaboration from Industry.It leverages open source solutions funded by Sabre Holdings.

Disappointing Feature

The only disappointing feature of OJAX version0.7 is, auto-expansion of individual fields works in Firefox but does not work in versions of Internet Explorer before 7.0 because of limitations in earlier versions of IE.