I have been working on getting CLUMP to pull information out of our LMS (Aleph) so that users can easily see which books from reading lists are currently available in the Library.  The result of the work is shown in the following screen shot.

The JavaScript in CLUMP has to make some AJAX requests to Aleph’s X-Server to pull out the information.  This required the need for another proxy script to be present on the same host as CLUMP to get around JavaScript’s security model.  One advantage of using a proxy is that you can put the username and password for your X-Server account in there and not give it to every user, not that they should be able to access any more information with it than the default X-Server account.  Always best to be careful though.

As we are trying to make sure that LORLS isn’t tied specifically to any one LMS the JavaScript used to pull out the current stock status is in a file on its own.  This file can be replaced with ones that contain code for getting the same information from other LMS’s.