Another day, another incremental improvement to Moriarty (svn revision 490)! After my last set of changes I thought I’d better hurry up and add the copy_to function to the FieldPredicateMap too. You can now clone Field/Predicate Maps from one store to another:

  $fp = new FieldPredicateMap("http://api.talis.com/stores/mystore/config/fpmaps/1");
  $response = $fp->get_from_network();
  if ( $response->is_success() ) {
    $new_fp = $fp->copy_to("http://api.talis.com/stores/otherstore/config/fpmaps/1");
    $new_fp->put_to_network();
  }

I then set about thinking through my plan for adding HTTP caching support to Moriarty. I want this to work automatically and transparently, taking advantage of conditional GETs on the Platform. I’ll let it be switched off by defining a constant but I want it to be there by default so the developer gets the benefit without any effort.

I stubbed out some initial ideas for the HttpCache class on the train this morning. Then at lunchtime today, Danny pinged me on IRC wondering why Moriarty didn’t have SPARQL ASK support. “Not by design”, I said, “more by lack of time. But it should be easy to add, give me 15 minutes”. Then I promptly went into a series of meetings that ate the rest of my day. In the end the code did only take 15 minutes, but I finished it 11 hours later than I expected. Hopefully Danny didn’t spend all that time waiting for me to respond on IRC

You can perform an ASK query on a store like this:

  $store = new Store("http://api.talis.com/stores/mystore");
  $sparql = $store->get_sparql_service();
  $response = $sparql->ask( "ASK WHERE {?s a .}" );
  if ($response->is_success()) {
    $result = $sparql->parse_ask_results( $response->body);
  }

Enjoy, Danny!

About Moriarty… Moriarty is a simple PHP library for accessing the Talis Platform. It follows the Platform API very closely and wraps ups many common tasks into convenient classes while remaining very lightweight. It also provides some simple RDF classes that are based on the excellent ARC2 class library. Moriarty is primarily being developed by Ian Davis and is in continual alpha, subject to occasional rapid bursts of change. You can read more about Moriarty on the n² wiki and get its source from the n² subversion repository