At the recent Open Repositories 2011 conference in Austin, one of the highlights was the Developer Challenge sponsored by DevSCI and coordinated by Mahendra Mahey. Open Repository’s entry demonstrated how the RESTful API module for DSpace can harvest communities and collections in DSpace
and be browsed in real-time in Joomla. We also demonstrated the ability
to deposit via a combination of SWORD and the RESTful API from Joomla
into a selected repository collection, and based on the credentials, a
specific part of the workflow.

You can see our presentation here:

As the
REST API is going to be part of the upcoming 1.8 release, the use of the
module will not be necessary to take advantage of the technology. Using
Joomla as a browseable front end to a DSpace repository opens up
significant opportunities for presentation of the communities and
collections and how they are interacted with.