As I hinted to in my post about Named Graph Exchange, and later picked up by Danny, it is possible to create a SPARQL endpoint using ARC with only six lines of PHP — or rather was, as Benjamin Nowack has now announced a suggested update, that makes it possible in only fourthree lines:

include_once('path/to/arc/ARC2.php');
$ep = ARC2::getStoreEndpoint(array(...));
$ep->go();

The same announcement, the ARC Release Notes and Change Log, and Benjamins post about his cool data wiki also mentions the new ARC plugin system, that I helped take off.

My plugin submission is essentially a SPARQL client, making it possible to use ARC for accessing remote SPARQL endpoints: ARC2::RemoteEndpointPlugin

The plugin works, in that it supports the read-only query types SELECT, CONSTRUCT, DESCRIBE, and ASK, but not yet the ones that write, since the ARC class that does HTTP only speaks GET at the moment.

The plugin homepage doubles as its documentation — it contains an example of how to use the plugin: Basically just like with a regular ARC2::Store, only with a simpler configuration — only a SPARQL endpoint URL is needed.

The homepage is also a Bazaar repository, and as such provides an Atom feed with updates, and — of course — a DOAP file, that I hope will one day play a role as the authoritative source of information shown on the ARC plugins page, with automatic updates.

Fitting, also, that this surfaces on the very day that SPARQL becomes a recommendation. It has been quite a journey, and fun to be a (small) part of, starting way back when Squish and RDQL were state of the art, and later with The Gargonza Experiment — perhaps it is now time to retire my partial SPARQL Rewriter and resurrect Sparqlette…