[Biojava-l] BioJava and DAS

[Joel Björkman]

Hello!

I'm new to org.biojava.bio.program.das and I have a couple of
questions regarding fetching features and sequences from dazzle
servers...

At the moment I'm only interested in getting the sequence and
annotations from ensembl's database, which should make the problem
easier.

It's quite obvious when you're browsing
http://servlet.sanger.ac.uk:8080/das/ that ensemble got a lot of data.

What I'm concerned about is when I look at the different segment sizes 
<SEGMENT id="21" size="46944323" subparts="yes"/>
Some of them are really big.

Taking a peek at the demo that follows with biojava-live shows that
you are supposed to download the entire sequence and then make
operations on it (eg substring).

DASSequenceDB dasDB = new DASSequenceDB(dbURL);
DASSequence dasSeq = (DASSequence) dasDB.getSequence(seqName);
System.out.println("1st 10 bases: " + dasSeq.subStr(1, 10));

Isn't there any way that's more efficient and nicer to the server? Is
there any way to throw requests like this:
http://servlet.sanger.ac.uk:8080/das/ensembl_Homo_sapiens_core_28_35a/dna?segment=21:1,10

regards

Joel