[MOBY-dev] Re: [MOBY] join operations

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi Ken, 

I will only quote the part that I object to:

On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 00:42, Ken Steube wrote:


> Then, forward it to
> one of the services to fill in X values.  That services fills in its
> part and sends to the second service.  

Ugly ugly ugly :-)

I may be alone here, but I absolutely do NOT want this kind of
responsibility to fall on the service provider.  IMO this is a 100%
client-side problem.  It is "MOBYesque" to make service provision as
mindlessly simple as possible (that is actually one of the founding
tenets of the MOBY project) - as soon as the service provider becomes
responsible for knowing how and where to forward your request it gets
unnecessarily complicated (unless it is something as mindless as a 302
Document Moved redirection).


> I don't believe this requires much change in our protoMOBY.  Just have
> a client search through the SOAP message for the part it understands
> and fill in that part.  Then forward it to some other service if
> necessary.

I agree with you in one respect - that MOBY Services can (perhaps are
obligated?) to hunt through a request for the pieces that they
understand and can work with.  In fact, I consider this to be part of
the central dogma of MOBY service provision.  What I am concerned about
is putting the responsibility for fulfilling an arbitrary request on the
shoulders of a possibly unrelated service provider.

... but as I said, I may be alone in my reservations here :-)

M



-- 
=======================================================================
                                    |--==\
Mark Wilkinson                       \==-|       1001010010010001001010
Bioinformatics Consultant             \=/        0010010010100101110010
Illuminae Media                       /-\        0010101110110100100101
727 6th Ave. N.                      /-==|       0010100100111101010010
Saskatoon, SK, Canada               |==-/        0101001000100101001011
S7K 2S8                              \=/         0100100100010010010101
+1 (306) 373 3841                     /\         1110101101110101001001
markw at illuminae.com                  /=-\        1101001010100101010101
                                    |--==\
=======================================================================