[MOBY-dev] [Fwd: [MISC] Re: Welcome!]

[Mark Wilkinson]

This was posted to the wrong list :-)

-----Forwarded Message-----
> From: Catherine Letondal <letondal at pasteur.fr>
> To: Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com>
> Cc: moby-l at biomoby.org
> Subject: [MISC] Re: Welcome!
> Date: 27 Aug 2003 18:58:18 +0200
> 
> 
> Mark Wilkinson wrote:
> > Hi Catherine!
> > 
> > Welcome to the moby-dev list.  If you have not already done so, please
> > also register for moby-l, since this is where most common discssion
> > takes place.
> > 
> > Since moby-dev is intended for core MOBY developers, and we often send
> > out open invitations to conference calls and so forth, I like to ask
> > everyone who subscribes to the -dev list to post a message introducing
> > themselves and explaining what types of development they plan to do.  I
> > discourage "lurking" on that list :-)
> > 
> > Best wishes!
> > 
> > Mark
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I like very much the BioMoby project, and, apart from participating in
> the very interesting discussions that take place in this list,  
> a reason why I'm interested in participating in this project is
> for the changes I wish to make in the next version of Pise, an
> interface generator I have built
> (http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/Pise/).   
> In fact I intend to change it from scratch, and one of the issues that
> I feel are very important, is to have a system that would
> integrate, not only locally installed programs, as does the current
> version of Pise, but also various remote analysis services.
> 
> I have read BioMoby (and myGrid, ISYS and biopipe and other) papers
> documentation and discussions, and it appears that it is a good
> framework for this development, for 2 reasons:
>  - Pise is based on various types of interface generators (Web, perl
> API, Tcl, Python, SeWer,..), and developping a generator for BioMoby-like
> services and install them here at Pasteur for the analysis services we
> provide, should be feasible,
>  - we wish to adopt the Web services approach,
>  - the integration of distributed services within a user interface, that 
> we wish to provide, would benefit from a service discovery mechanism, and 
> the one that is used in BioMoby (with a view on myGrid as far as I have 
> understood?) could suits our needs.
> 
> But there is something else we would like to develop, and I would be
> happy to get some feedback from people in this list about it. We
> really would like to make other Web servers available to users of Pise
> in the same user interface and at the same level of choice. But one 
> difficulty for a server (so I mean any Web server) to be available in
> BioMoby is that you need to make a wrapper, install SOAP::Lite,
> etc... on a public server (as explained in
> http://www.biomoby.org/SettingUpServices.html). This is 
> not always feasible and not every analysis service provider will be OK
> to take the time to install everything for this to work. 
> 
> So one possibility could be to have this BioMoby wrapping performed and
> installed independantly, e.g having the wrapping in an independant server
> (maybe what L. Stein calls the knuckles-and-nodes approach?), acting as a
> kind of proxy for the legacy server;
> http://www.pasteur.fr/~letondal/tmp/kn.png illustrates this idea.
> 
> One solution could be to have this wrapper generated by Pise: Pise DTD
> already describes how to wrap a local standalone program, so there it should
> be feasible to describe how to wrap a Web server. This description is
> not exactly the same as a WSDL description, since its role is to describe the
> correspondances between two interfaces: the generic one, conforming to
> BioMoby, and the legacy Web server one. For this purpose, WIDL (Web
> Interface Definition Language) might be interesting (it is a note to the W3C
> - see http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-widl-970922). I don't know whether it
> has been adopted, I believe not, but it is similar to the concept that I'm
> looking for. 
> 
> So, I don't know whether such an idea has already been discussed, or
> if someone has already worked on it?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your feedback!
> 
> 
> --
> Catherine Letondal -- Pasteur Institute Computing Center
-- 
Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com>
Illuminae