Lost Boy

MusicBrainz Java API beta-1

I've just uploaded the beta-1 of my shiny new Java API onto the MusicBrainz RDF web service.

If you're not familiar with MusicBrainz, it's similar to CDDB: it stores lists of artists, albums and tracks that can be used to add metadata to your music collection. Aaron Swartz wrote a nice article on it a while ago: "MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service" (warning PDF).

There's been a C/C++ API for some time now with bindings for other languages, but no Java API. And as I want to hook some Java code up to the server I went ahead and wrote one.

It's not complete yet. It's read-only at the moment so doesn't support the query methods used to authenticate and submit data to the service. However this is enough for me at present and I thought I'd release it in case anyone else finds it useful.

The API is built on the spangly new Jena 2 API, and provides "raw" access to the RDF responses from the server or a simple bean interface for those of you not interested in the RDF.

You can download the API and read the package documentation online. The latter contains a few code fragments and enough information to get you started. The unit tests are pretty comprehensive too, so look there for additional examples.

This API is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Posted by ldodds at September 22, 2003 01:50 PM | Feedback? | | TrackBack