[MOBY-dev] Updates to MOBY Central and IMPORTANT NOTES for registry hosts

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all,

First off, apologies to anyone who was trying to get through to MOBY  
Central this afternoon - Eddie and I were making the changes necessary to  
get it ready for SOAP::Lite 0.69 and the changes that worked perfectly on  
the test server didn't work on the real MOBY Central... so it took a  
couple of hours of troubleshooting before we had it back up again.

The good news is that it seems to work correctly with both Perl and Java  
clients.  What we don't know is if it is backwards compatible with earlier  
versions of the MOBY::Client::* libraries, in particular,  
MOBY::Client::Service.  I *think* it is, but we didn't have the  
opportunity to test it.  In any case, the API did not change, so if you  
just cvs update your client libraries everything should come back to life  
if it isn't working.

Upgrading to SOAP::Lite 0.69 was a nightmare!  The new SOAP::Lite behaves  
subtly differently than the old one in several ways that we were not  
expecting.  Thankfully, Pieter and Eddie had done most of the  
trouble-shoting already, but it still threw us for a loop in some places  
with incompatible SOAP version errors and a new auto-encoding of strings  
by SOAP::Lite that we used to do in-code by ourselves (resulting in  
double-coded messages).

Anyway, it's done now.  Please scream loudly if it doesn't work for you!!   
I have backups of everything so if necessary we can roll-back quickly.

All of this was done primarily to get us to be compatible with the new  
Asynchronous services API that use the Manchester WSRF::Lite modules which  
depend on SOAP::Lite 0.69.  Can I ask the good folks at INB to test the  
code to see if it works for them v.v. Async services?  The database can  
now hold Category=moby-async (which reminds me, I need to update the  
database templates in the CVS...), and Eddie assures me that the code will  
now provide correct WSDL for an Asych interface.  The myGrid folks have  
added moby-async as a valid service category into their ontology as well,  
so in principle... it should all work... (touch wood!)

*********************
IMPORTANTLY this means that the new MOBY Central code will likely NOT work  
on versions of SOAP::Lite prior to 0.69!!!  Keep this in mind if you are  
running your own registry...
*********************

Tomorrow (if I have regained my sanity after todays hell ;-) ) I'll try to  
make the changes to gbrowse_moby such that it can also invoke asynchronous  
services.  I think the Async modules also need to be added to the MANIFEST  
before they are installed by default, so I'll try to remember to do that  
as well.

Otherwise there were just some small changes to the test suite to better  
clean-up the registry if something goes wrong during testing, and I  
cleaned-up the test database so that it also doesn't cause the test suite  
to fail.  I will restart the test registry using the new codebase first  
thing in the morning so that the two are identical.

We still haven't figured out why those namespace changes happened a couple  
of days ago.  It coincided with the Gene Ontology curators making some  
additions to the Namespace list, so I suspect that there is a bug in the  
interface I have given to them (which talks directly to the database  
without using the MOBY API), but exactly WHY this happened is still a  
mystery.  I've alerted Midori to the problem and she's going to hold-off  
on making any more changes until we can figure out what is going wrong.

That's all the news from MOBY Central!

Let us know ASAP if you notice anything wrong.  It's been a rough ride  
today...

Mark