[MOBY-dev] Web server adaptors

[Lincoln Stein]

Hi,

I'm responding rather late to this, but I would like to throw my enthusiastic 
support behind the idea of wrapping Pise services into a bioMOBY framework.  
There is a tremendous amount of value in these "legacy" web servers, and it 
would be a great win to provide an easy upgrade path for them.

Lincoln

On Sunday 21 September 2003 03:57 am, Catherine Letondal wrote:
> > > 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?
>
> Hi,
>
> As I described in this "presentation" message, we would be interested
> in using Pise as an adaptor generator for legacy Web servers.
> http://www.pasteur.fr/~letondal/biomoby/kn.png
> The main idea is to re-use Pise "wrapping" technology (Pise is
> an adaptor for Unix programs running locally). As shown in
> this diagram: http://www.pasteur.fr/~letondal/biomoby/pise-adapt-en.png
> the role of Pise would be:
>     - to generate a WSDL description of the service
>     (from a manually written Pise-like XML description)
>     - to generate the code for the service (BioMoby style): this
>     code contains the wrapping from the XML syntax to the legacy
>     server syntax.
>
> The first step will be however to provide a Biomoby interface for
> existing Pise servers:
> http://www.pasteur.fr/~letondal/biomoby/pise-biomoby.png
>
> The idea of this approach is to adapt to the actual biomoby project
> and technical guidelines.
>
> We were really happy to get some feedback! :-)
> Some researchers here at Pasteur said us that
> such an adaptation of legacy servers would be very useful, but a
> feedback from people experienced in the biomoby architecture is also
> critical. Do you think this could be useful? Has someone already
> worked about a similar idea?
>
> Thanks in advance,

-- 
========================================================================
Lincoln D. Stein                           Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
lstein at cshl.org			                  Cold Spring Harbor, NY
========================================================================