[MOBY-dev] BioMOBY Asynchronous Service Call Proposal v2.2

[Johan Karlsson]

Hello,

Attached to this email you can find an updated version (2.2) of the INB proposal
for asynchronous services.

We have added some things that were suggested during the discussions and changed
some wordings to make it more clear what is intended. Please see summary in the
end of this letter for the main changes. We are very grateful for earlier
comments and suggestions and hope for more. If there is something we missed to
update from the earlier discussion, please let us know.

The great difference from the earlier public version is that we are now using an
OASIS standard, the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), to communicate
status and results. The main reason is that the polling approach that we are
advocating requires that the web-service in question maintains some sort of
state and WSRF is exactly intended to provide a standardised way to handle
this.

We realise that WSRF might be a new experience for many BioMOBY-developers and
therefore we have developed some functions to simplify implementation of
asynchronous services and clients (in Perl) and a prototype to illustrate their
use. In fact, to write a basic asynchronous BioMOBY service with the library is
not much different compared to how it is done for synchronous services (see
HelloWorld.pm).

More details about the modules and the prototype here:

http://bioinfo.pcm.uam.es/prototype/

There you can also find an example of a WSDL (mentioned in the document but not
included as appendix for reasons of readability). The parts relating to WSRF
would have to be added to the WSDL that MobyCentral generates today.

Let us restart the discussions and reach an agreement soon, asynchronous
services/clients are definitely needed. Should we set as a goal to reach a
decision on the RFC by the end of August?

Suggestions/improvements and comments for both the proposal and the modules are
greatly welcomed.

Summary of major changes in the document:

-    WSRF to communicate state information instead of MobyStatus
-     It is possible to retrieve results or status for specific mobyData inputs
("jobs")
-    Better descriptions of job and batch-call
-    More descriptions of the error-cases
-    Updated information about how to describe async services in RDF
     (Mark, can you please double-check this, we need a Boolean value for this)
-   The category field from findService output will have four allowed values
'moby', 'moby-async', 'cgi' and 'soap'.
-    The SOAP method to start a call is now called servicename_submit (before
servicename_async)

Apologies for the long delay but there has been some fundamental changes that
required some study and implementation.

Warm greetings from Malaga,
Johan Karlsson, GNV5

-- 
Johan Karlsson
Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática (INB)
Integrated Bioinformatics Node (GNV-5)
Dpto. de Arquitectura de Computadores
Campus Universitario de Teatinos, despacho 2.3.9a
29071 Málaga (Spain)
+34 95 213 3387
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