[MOBY-dev] Services in registry

[Ola Spjuth]

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