[DAS] Re: [Call to action] Retrieval of positions from feature identifiers

[Matthew Pocock]

Hi Lincoln, still some questions...

> On the subject of UDDI, I've read through the specs, but the language
> that they use "business contacts", "access points", "businessEntity",
> "businessKey" is totally business oriented.  There is certainly a lot
> that we can borrow from the specification, but to implement the 40
> SOAP messages required by a fully compliant UDDI registry is not only
> overkill, but most of the messages are irrelevant to what we want to
> do.
> 
> Lincoln
> 	


Why is bioinformatics so special that we need to invent something 
ourself from scratch? We haven't written our own DNS, and SQL databases 
are starting to be used widely. The UDDI specs do use business words a 
lot in the spec, but they have obvious mappings to things like research 
institutes and services we want to publicise. I doubt anybody writing a 
DAS server will implement a UDDI registry - why not just register with 
IBM, Microsoft or one of the other free registration services? If most 
messages are irrelevant, then we won't need to use them. There are uddi 
client libraries for several languages, so DAS client and server 
implementations probably just need to link against one of these to be 
uddi-tastic. Plus, if we use a public service like this, then we have a 
much better chance of getting a high-availability service.

Just to be clear, I have no personal attachment to UDDI, but it is as I 
understand it the industry standard and globaly accessible method for 
publishing SOAP services, and that is the itch we're trying to scratch. 
If something else is, then we should use that instead.

Matthew