Desktop Integration

ericmjonas
I love zotero. In fact, it's basically replaced bookmarks in my life. But now I'd like to have it better-integrate with my desktop. I know that I can directly talk to the underlying sqlite db (even if only in a read-only fashion), but I was curious if there might be any other way of getting out-of-process communication with an active zotero instance. I'm sure you guys have given this at least a little thought, and you're far more familiar with the underlying web technologies than I am, so I was hoping you might have some suggestions. Alternatively, if the zotero sync service provided some sort of REST API that made it easy to query against, I could simply talk to the sync server (although that might also not be what you want). Any suggestions?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Alternatively, if the zotero sync service provided some sort of REST API that made it easy to query against, I could simply talk to the sync server
    It does—we just haven't published documentation on it yet. You can figure out some of it from the Atom feeds on the website (which are just API calls), however.

    The main client-side alternative is to use something like MozRepl, which gives you telnet access to Firefox's internal JS environment.
  • ericmjonas
    MozRepl looks awesome, thanks. I'm also going to poke around the API a bit, as long as you guys are okay with that eventually being a supported interaction mechanism (It's fine if it's not documented right now, but I don't want to be making your lives any harder).
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Yes, the API will be a supported interaction mechanism in the near future (and is already used for a number of things). If your library isn't public you'll need to generate an API key from your account settings on zotero.org.

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