One of the deliverables from NRAO based on several meetings with the astronomical community is that Splatalogue should be Virtual Observatory (ie, VO) compliant. As such, we have developed the appropriate interface following the standard IVOA spectral line access protocols, i.e. the IVOA standard SLAP protocol.
Our colleague Ray Plante (NCSA and the University of Illinois) from the IVOA has been working with the NRAO on this application to make it as general as possible so that any catalog that has the same database format as Splatalogue can easily implement. We like to call it a "plug-and-play" VO application. This work has been finished and is publically available off a VO site. Check out http://trac.us-vo.org/project/nvo/wiki/SplataSLAP. There you can grab a tarball to configure and install the SLAP service for a Splatalogue like database. The README.txt provides instructions for installation. Also, when one creates a compiled java program, a JAR (Java Archive) file is created that you can run at the command prompt. The WAR (web application archive) file is designed (not surprisingly) to be run off the web. Any other details should be transparent.
Finally, our local NRAO VO expert Brian Kent has also generated some code accessing the database via the SLAP protocols with php and IDL. They are available at:
ftp://ftp.cv.nrao.edu/NRAO-staff/bkent/slap/
These are only examples of what can be done accessing a SLAP server. For the GBT, for example, who extensively use IDL as their data reduction software, they can implement what Brian wrote to access line ids, etc...
If there are any further questions or help that NRAO can provide installing the service or deploying it, please let us know by mailing splatalogue AT nrao DOT edu.