[Biojava-l] GO web service

[Simon Brocklehurst]

Ewan Birney wrote:

> I remember all these discussions from those great CORBA days. Boy am I
> staying away from this for the moment... (too scared frankly!)
> 

I don't blame ya...

I don't want to be negative (it's not useful), but I suspect not
everyone out there is too experienced at building distributed computer
systems.  My concern is that this (and other) talk about Web Services
may leave lots of people with the impression that Web Services are
something they're not.

Two things people need to know:

1) Building great distributed computer systems is hard.

2) If you're gonna do it, CORBA/J2EE over IIOP/RMI/RMI over IIOP are
orders of magnitude more useful than Web Services over http - assuming
you want to build a distributet, object-orientated (and possible
Enterprise-class) computer systems.

Right now, Web Services is nothing more than CGI done a tiny bit
better.  That's fine if all you want to do is run Blast (in fact, Web
Services is really good things like that).  But they're not good if you
want to build an even slightly sophisticated distributed computer
system.

I truly don't understand the excitement about Web Services -
pleeeaaaasssee no-one say they're really good for tunelling through
firewalls, I can't be doin' with that old chestnut ;-)

Ho hum... just my two cents etc...

Simon
--
Simon M. Brocklehurst, Ph.D.
Director of Informatics & Robotics
Cambridge Antibody Technology
The Science Park, Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, UK
http://www.CambridgeAntibody.com/
mailto:simon.brocklehurst@CambridgeAntibody.com