[Biojava-l] BioJava DAS server - version 0.04

[Thomas Down]

I have updated my experimental servlet-based DAS implementation to match 
version 0.98 of the DAS spec, and added the start of a sensible (?) 
configuration interface.  The new version is running now at:

  http://das.ensembl.org/test/das/

If you want to experiment with the server, or just try it out locally, 
you can download source from:

  http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Users/td2/dazzle-0.04.tar.gz

In principle, you can add your own data to the server just by adding an 
entry to dazzlecfg.xml.  In practice, the current DASDataSource 
implementations are fairly limited, so you might need to write your 
own.  Some more useful general purpose DataSources are my priority for 
the next version.

The source distribution also contains the beginnings of a BioJava DAS 
client.  This still needs some optimization work to make it really 
useful, but it's getting there.


Where next?

I'm hoping to get all this code checked in to the BioJava CVS repository 
in the next few days.  The client backend code can go straight into the 
BioJava main tree.  The server will be in its own CVS module, but 
probably still in the same repository.

Other priorities:

  - Finalize the DASDataSource interface -- it can probably be 
simpilified a bit
   without too much trouble

  - Make the servlet initialization much finer-grained.  Right now, it 
usually has to do a lot of
     initialization just to handle the first /dsn request it receives.  
Sorting this out will improve
     the scalability a lot.

Happy hacking,

   Thomas