[Biojava-l] GO web service

[Ewan Birney]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Dickson, Mike wrote:

> 
> > The "official" OMG way to do this is via UML and some buzz word about
> > technology free modelling, but there is still a massive tendancy for
> > top-down-design-by-committee, which I think just doesn't work, and frankly
> > the Biojava/BioPerl data model (which are reasonably in sync, give or take
> > the odd split location thang) is a fine way to start, and the usual
> > "propose idea on list, and whoever codes it wins the argument" is a far
> > better resolving procedure than committees
> 
> I'm not going to get into this one other than to say that this is clearly an
> opinion and it doesn't represent everyone's position (not mine at least).
> For the record, I'm on the board of directors of the OMG. 

Apologies Mike - that was not meant as a low snipe. I do have a more
serious point which the "working code, open discussion and progressive
refactoring" which is how the Bio* projects work is bascially
ExtremeProgramming in a geographically distributed way, and I think gives
the best results. Of course, YMMV.

The "top downess" mainly comes from people's other experience (especially
failures) to inform how the refactoring should work.


I also echo Simon's point. Working code implies code which both works
*and* is useful in a real life situation.


Enough of this. I will be intrigued to discover how useful web services
are, and probably the way to get our feet wet is to see how this caBio
project (the NCI folks) works out from at least the client perspective.