[MOBY-l] MOBY going down... three hour warning

[mwilkinson at gene.pbi.nrc.ca]

Hi everyone,

Since there have been no objections to my earlier question about totally
re-writing MOBY Central, I have now finished the coding and
documentation, and am ready to both commit the code, and update
MOBY Central itself.  I will do this at ~1:00 EST, 10:00 PST in case you
are actively working on things.  It will probably be down for about 3
hours while I test everything again, and tweak the CGI client program to
talk to the new interface.

The changes are quite massive...  MOBY::Central now outputs XML or small
objects (MOBY::Registration), rather than scalars, lists, and hashes -
this should help people like Brian who are porting it to other
languages.  I have written a client-side wrapper (MOBY::Client::Central)
for the Perl folks which parses this XML and converts it into Perl
objects (a new MOBY::Client::ServiceInstance object), lists, scalars, or
simple hashes depending on the complexity of the output.  I have also
hopefully made it easier to set up and call  a MOBY Central registry "at
home" by adding additional parameters to the ->new call.

Within a few days I will be moving MOBY::Central to a server that is
being set up for it at CBR (Canadian Bioinformatics Resource) in
Halifax.  Simon Mercer is overseeing this transition.  I hope that this
will become a permanent home for MOBY Central.  This also gets it off of
my desktop and into a more suitable location ;-)  allowing me to
experiment on my local installation without bothering with anyone else.

We have also set up a new domain:

                mobycentral.cbr.nrc.ca

This will point to the machine hosting the MOBY Central registry,
regardless of where it resides in the future (at CBR, that is), so
hopefully this will be the last time I have to warn you of a major
change to its location.

All of these changes will be followed by a "documentation drive" over
the next week.  I want to write as much documentation as possible to
help people (1) understand MOBY Central behaviour, (2) understand how to
set up services, how to register them, (3) begin a list of "best
practices" for MOBY service providers, (4) understand how to set up
MOBY Central locally.

So... tick tick tick... Let me know ASAP if this is going to interfere
with anyone's plans.

M


--
--------------------------------
"Speed is subsittute fo accurancy."
________________________________

Dr. Mark Wilkinson, RA Bioinformatics
National Research Council, Plant Biotechnology Institute
110 Gymnasium Place, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

phone : (306) 975 5279
pager : (306) 934 2322
mobile: markw_mobile at illuminae.com