[MOBY-l] service = method ?

[Gudmundur Arni Thorisson]

Aha, I think I only followed the second half or  so of the discussion! 
Sorry about that. But let me comment on the >1 method issue then, after 
having read some more postings: I can definately imagine a 'service-suite'
  that Mark (I think) was talking about earlier, where each 'sub'-service 
does only one job with a certain kind of object. The Unix-philosophy, 
piping the output of one program into the next, is something that I 
generally hold with, and therefore I like the whole MOBY philosophy as 
well.
   But one question though, to the MOBY-savvy developer: could the service 
provider define a 'super'-service of some kind,  in MOBY-speech, that uses 
two or more of its own methods implicitly, so that the user does not have 
to bother with the middle steps? Something like what Mark wrote earlier:

> $x = $y->operation1->operation2->operation3

but where this multi-level operation would be a MOBY-service in itself, 
something like a quick&dirty db-search+alignment operation:

  1) get input seq
  1) blast seq against db
  2) get seq hits
  3) build multiple aligments from hits
  4) return alignment

To put it in Perl-ish: $aln = $foo->blast_and_aln($seq,$db,\%pars) || die 
"Someone messed up!"

  Or maybe I am going overboard here. I suppose one would generally want to 
examine the db-search result set from the blast-service and then use the 
aligment service afterwards. Would perhaps be going way outside the 
MOBY-domain anyway. Just a thought... [mumble, mumble, drifting off to 
sleep...zzzzZZZZzz]


             Mummi, CSHL

On Monday, October 28, 2002, at 07:47 PM, Martin Senger wrote:

> It seems that my question attracted some attention but to be fair I do not
> understand some answers we have received. Very probably the fault is mine
> - I did not express myself clearly. Please allow me to ask it again and
> simply:
>
> Can a Moby central register a web service that has more tha one method?
> Does it want to do it? And can such methods be dependent on each other (in
> a sense that one must always be called before the second one)?
>
> The example I gave about timely jobs was perhaps misleading. Because the
> situation does not need to deal with time-consuming jobs, but with the
> whole "bussiness logic". For example, a bibliographic query service may
> want to refine queries step-ny-step, each time getting more precise
> results of the query. Such example would easily require to have one method
> for starting the query and yet another method for continuation queries.
>
> And by the way, the Moby central itself is an example of a web service
> that has always two dependent methods (new() and a real one). Therefore,
> if Moby central accept only one-method services, we will not be able to
> register the Moby central itself in Moby central (I am not saying that I
> ask for it but I am just playing with the idea...).
>
>    Martin
>
> --
> Martin Senger
>
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> European Bioinformatics Institute        Phone: (+44) 1223 494636
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>
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>
--
----------------------------------------------------
Gudmundur Arni Thorisson, bioinformatics researcher, B.Sc.
Steinlab, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
w-phone#: 516-367-6904
w-fax#:   516-367-8389
1 Bungtown Road
Cold Spring Harbor
11724 New York
USA
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