[Biocorba-l] Re: BOSC BOF Report

[Martin Senger]

Hi,
   First, I would like to thank people who started this mailing list -
quite useful thing. Thanks.
   Second, I am from the OpenBSA team so I may know some details about OMG
BSA specification (BSA stands for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis) and will
be happy to answer your questions.
   Having said that I have to add that BSA spec are actually two specs
together, one is in module DsLSRAnalysis and it represents a general,
domain independent engine for starting, controlling and using any analysis
(programs, applications, etc.) - to send data to an analysis and to
retrieve results when it is finished. I know more about this part...
  ...but there is also a module DsLSRBioObjects which defines several
domain specific bio-objects (sequence, allignment, etc.). This module will
be probably more of interest of this mailing list I guess.

>
> * Didn't want to adopt a COMPLETELY different standard but the valuetype 
> part of the OMG spec makes it incompatible with non-java, opensource
> ORBs.
>
   Valuetypes may have been pain-in-the-neck a year ago but the things are
changing fast. At the moment there are ORBs supporting valuetypes - and
surely there are also non-java ORBs with valuetypes. So do not be so
pesimistic :-)
   The BSA submitters decided to use valuetypes because of the ability to
use inheritance and still to have a lighweight data structure (not a
"heavyweight" corba interface all the time). Therefore, BSA spec does not
use any methods in valuetypes - so there is no problems with "implementing
a method on the client side" - no questions of type "should a server
provide a code for the clients?" (which could be java specific).
   During BSA implementation, we also found that using valuetypes was
straightforward and our fears from valuetypes (and we had them!) had soon
disappeard.

   Cheers,
   Martin

-- 
Martin Senger

EMBL Outstation - Hinxton                Senger@EBI.ac.uk     
European Bioinformatics Institute        Phone: (+44) 1223 494636      
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Cambridge CB10 1SD
United Kingdom                           http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~senger