ARIN's RESTful Whois Directory Service Available 26 June

[markk at arin.net (Mark Kosters)]

<Apologies for the duplicate email but want to keep you informed about 
 changes occurring at ARIN. This particular upgrade may be of interest to 
 those who are not subscribed to arin-announce.>

----- Forwarded message from Member Services <info at arin.net> -----

From: Member Services <info at arin.net>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:00:42 -0400
To: "arin-announce at arin.net" <arin-announce at arin.net>
Subject: [arin-announce] ARIN's RESTful Whois Directory Service Available 26 June

ARIN is deploying an improved Whois service called Whois-RWS on 26 June 
2010. Included in the deployment are the following services that provide 
the general public with access to ARIN's registration data.

* a RESTful Web Service (RWS)
* a NICNAME/WHOIS port 43 service
* a user-friendly web site (http://whois.arin.net)

When using Whois-RWS you will notice some differences in behavior for 
certain queries and corresponding result sets on the NICNAME/WHOIS TCP 
port 43 service. These minor differences are documented at:

https://www.arin.net/resources/whoisrws/whois_diff.html

ARIN's Directory Service for registration data has used the 
NICNAME/WHOIS protocol since its inception. The limitations of the 
NICNAME/WHOIS protocol are well known and documented in RFC3912.
Whois-RWS was created as an alternative to the ARIN Whois and will 
provide much richer functionality and capability to the community.

Whois-RWS can easily be integrated into command line scripts, or it can 
be used with a web browser, which makes it applicable for programmatic 
consumption and accessible for interactive use. ARIN will continue to 
maintain services for the NICNAME/WHOIS protocol on TCP/43. This is 
achieved by using a proxy service to translate traditional ARIN Whois 
queries into Whois-RWS queries. However, ARIN recommends use of the 
RESTful Web Service.

Those who choose to use the Whois-RWS Proxy will find it has many 
features unavailable over the existing Whois service, including:

* Support for new query types such as CIDR queries
* Better feedback for ambiguous queries
* More finely scoped record type queries
* Options for NICNAME/WHOIS clients that re-interpret traditional 
parameters used by ARIN's service.
* RESTful URL references, useful for embedding into documents and e-mail
* Better grouping of record types and delineation of results

Another major benefit is that data from ARIN's registration database is 
distributed to the Whois-RWS servers many times throughout the day, 
versus the once-a-day update of ARIN's previous Whois service. Changes 
will be reflected more quickly through Whois-RWS, so query results will 
be more current than the previous Whois service.

ARIN continues to welcome community participation on the Whois-RWS 
mailing list, and we invite you to subscribe and provide feedback to:

http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-whoisrws

Regards,


Mark Kosters
Chief Technical Officer
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

----- End forwarded message -----