[DAS] playing tricks with cgi viewers

[Cheung, Foo]

Hi all

I have been playing a few tricks over the last few hours with das viewers
and das servers over the internet.

One of the goals I would like to see (and hopefully others would find this
useful) is to get ALL the Das Servers up and running on a "single" cgi based
Viewer sitting on your own home page with little or no coding at all! and
ASAP. This goal has a few problems...there are some variations bewteen das
servers and that some cgi viewers are able view some servers while others
cannot. This will be more fragmented when you get some servers serving
annotations by the DAS 2 protocol and then there will be slight differences
between DAS 2 servers. Then add to this sercurity issues which has been a
stumbling block for me... etc

One way to quickly overcome all/most of this with little or no coding, is
from "one das viewer", call upon many das viewers at one time and use each
of their ability to return a subset of Das servers for a particular organism
and hopefully by using a combination of viewers you will be able to return a
single view containing a full set of servers.

This is not ideal, obviously in the ideal situation you have one cgi DAS
viewer without a "distributed viewer system" that returns all das servers of
all versions ie. das v2 das v1, das v.9, das v.8, das v.bad, das v.2, das
v.3 etc. But I cant see a cgi viewer capable of doing all this for some time
to come, in the interim this method might be useful.

I thus played a few ticks with my viewers and with the C elegans DASview
over the internet (sorry Lincoln I probably should of asked first!).
I used the C elegans  DasView to call data from the human reference server
and returned it to TIGR as a png image, and within the same viewer and on
the same view, I used my own viewers to grab the pngs from all the TIGR
human servers and added it to the same view. Thus on one cgi viewer I can
call upon many other viewers to return a set of pngs and view tham all in
one web page/view. (I came up with this crazy idea because I could not
directly pick up some of the non tigr human servers out there possibiliy
because of sercurity issues I have here)

I think doing it this way you may pick up all DAS servers with very little
or no coding at all and view it on one cgi DAS viewer on your home page :)
using this sort of "distributed viewer system". As I said this is not ideal
but just a lazy thought.


The dasviewer I was experimenting with can be found below:
(http://www.tigr.org/docs/tigr-scripts/nhgi_scripts/das_human_test/dasview_h
uman)

I will be interested to hear any thoughts

Foo



I know this is written very badly! but its 5.30 am and I have my finals
tommorrow :(