[MOBY-dev] a question and a comment about the new Object inheritance

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all, 

So, I just went through and updated all of my services to follow the new
Object inheritance system. It took 5 minutes :-)  Turns out that most of
my services only output "Object" anyway, so they don't need any work,
and the ones that output other things like DNASequence and GO_Term were
already following the proposed API anyway, so... only TWO of my services
actually were affected by the proposed change!  I hope that others have
the same experience.

I did, however, notice a potential hiccup that we didn't foresee at the
meeting.  At the moment, binary data in MOBY is passed as a child of
base-64-encoded, which is a child of String.  Under the new system, we
can't have children of String, so do we then need a new primitive class
for binary data?  I think it still needs to be b64 encoded, but it seems
to me that it does need its own primitive now.

opinions anyone?

M