[MOBY-dev] Web server adaptors

[Catherine Letondal]

> > 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,

-- 
Catherine Letondal -- Pasteur Institute Computing Center