[MOBY-dev] Services in registry
Ola Spjuth
ola.spjuth at farmbio.uu.se
Thu Aug 30 14:27:13 UTC 2007
Hello,
After trying to programmatically access several services I turned to
using the dashboard and found that there are many in "default"
registry which answer with "Connection refused", "Operation timed
out" etc. Shouldn't the purpose of service discovery be that you only
discover available services? How does this process work? Doesn't the
registry poll (from time to time) if services are available?
There are also some (I have tried several) services which answer
"Response could not be parsed", "(500)Internal Server Error", and
some respond with a stacktrace in the moby:serviceNotes tag. Many
services also have poor or limited description, which makes it hard
(almost impossible for novice users) to interpret what they actually
do. I guess the solution to this is to require unit tests of a
service upon registration, which the server can test the service with
from time to time and make sure that it is operational. It should at
least be quite simple to just send e.g. a predefined
AminoAcidSequence to all services which accept them as inputs and
verify that you get a valid result back. In case of failure, remove
it from the registry and send an email to the responsible person.
I am wondering how to use BioMoby in our rich client Bioclipse
(www.bioclipse.net) at present. Is the resolution to set up our own
central repository which we manually curate? How can I in that case
synchronize this with the BioMoby registry but only include services
which are actually available and return something useful (and omit
all services meant for testing)? How are things done for the
different registries available in the dashboard? Is it even possible
for a person to document someone else's services?
It is not my intention to sound negative. BioMoby looks extremely
promising and will be an integral part of our project's future. Maybe
I have just been unlucky with choosing services for testing. Could
someone give me a few names of services which accept 1-2
AminoAcidSequence's and are fully operational from the dashboard?
Cheers,
Ola
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