Developer Center

Welcome to the developer hub of Open Library! This page links you to all of the information and external resources that will help you get started working with the Open Library system.

There are two ways you can hack on Open Library:

• API: Others may want to build applications using the Open Library API.
  
• Software infrastructure: You may want to install your own version of the Open Library software to customize it to your needs.

Infogami

Open Library is powered by Infogami, a clean, simple wiki application framework built on web.py. Unlike other wikis, Infogami has the flexibility to handle different classes of data, including structured data. That makes it the perfect platform for Open Library.

Basically, Infogami facilitates the creation of dynamic HTML templates and macros. This flexible environment enables users to create, share and build collaborative interfaces. We'd love to see more of these spring up around Open Library!

Applications are written by extending Infogami through two layers: plugins and templates. Plugins are Python modules that get loaded into Infogami through a special API. (See an overview of Infogami plugins.) They are invoked by submitting HTTP requests to the application, either HTML form posts or direct GET requests. Plugins can use any library or application code that they wish, and they create Python objects to represent results, that then get expanded to HTML by templates. Templates are a mixture of HTML text and user-written code, in the spirit of PHP templates. The user-written code is in a special-purpose scripting language that is approximately a Python subset, which runs in a hopefully-secure server-side interpreter embedded in the Python app that has limited access to system functions and resources.

We have compiled a Infogami Developer Tutoria to help you get started. You'll learn how to develop for Infogami, including building new templates for displaying your own data, running your own copy, and developing new features and plugins.

Markdown

The Open Library site also uses Markdown, a text-to-HTML formatting language created by John Gruber. See the syntax page to get started.

The Internet Archive Book Reader

If you want to display books on another site, you're welcome to use the code that runs the gorgeous Internet Archive Book Reader. Just like Infogami, the code is open source and available for download and modification by anyone who wants to use it. You can read more about how to get started with the Book Reader.

Also, you should review our primer on Book Reader URLs to understand how the code handles URLs.