[Biojava-l] GO web service

[Patrick McConnell]

Web services are not good for object-oriented distributed systems because
web services do not describe behavior well, they describe data well.  CORBA
is terrible with data because it doesn't interoperate with other systems.
You can build the most beatiful, elegent RMI based system in Java, and I
will never be able to access that functionality from my .NET client, or my
perl client, or my LISP client, or my whatever.  For many, this is fine
because they are working within a single business and have control over
both the client and the server.  This isn't the case in bioinformatics,
were cross-organizational collaboration is a necessity.

I think very few bioinformaticians are interested in sophisticated
distributed systems.  Instead, they just want to be able to get at data and
tools easily.  I think Web services will do that for them better than any
CORBA based technology.  Am I wrong here?

I have heard the argument before, and I still don't buy that web services
is just CGI done a tiny bit better.  CGI and web services have quite
similar qualities and uses, but the ability to strongly type data in XML
and to dynamically discover operations/data types makes web services quite
a bit better.  Both of these are keys to successfully building flows of
services, which is were I think web services really transcend all previous
technologies.  Now, if we could just get a flow implementation from a major
vendor, we could start building complex tools from simple web services and
really start using the power of web services : - )

-Patrick





Simon Brocklehurst <simon.brocklehurst@CambridgeAntibody.com>@biojava.org
on 08/30/2002 03:57:29 PM

Sent by:    biojava-l-admin@biojava.org


To:    Ewan Birney <birney@ebi.ac.uk>
cc:    Brian Gilman <gilmanb@genome.wi.mit.edu>, Patrick McConnell
       <MCCon012@mc.duke.edu>, biojava-l@biojava.org

Subject:    Re: [Biojava-l] GO web service


Ewan Birney wrote:

> I remember all these discussions from those great CORBA days. Boy am I
> staying away from this for the moment... (too scared frankly!)
>

I don't blame ya...

I don't want to be negative (it's not useful), but I suspect not
everyone out there is too experienced at building distributed computer
systems.  My concern is that this (and other) talk about Web Services
may leave lots of people with the impression that Web Services are
something they're not.

Two things people need to know:

1) Building great distributed computer systems is hard.

2) If you're gonna do it, CORBA/J2EE over IIOP/RMI/RMI over IIOP are
orders of magnitude more useful than Web Services over http - assuming
you want to build a distributet, object-orientated (and possible
Enterprise-class) computer systems.

Right now, Web Services is nothing more than CGI done a tiny bit
better.  That's fine if all you want to do is run Blast (in fact, Web
Services is really good things like that).  But they're not good if you
want to build an even slightly sophisticated distributed computer
system.

I truly don't understand the excitement about Web Services -
pleeeaaaasssee no-one say they're really good for tunelling through
firewalls, I can't be doin' with that old chestnut ;-)

Ho hum... just my two cents etc...

Simon
--
Simon M. Brocklehurst, Ph.D.
Director of Informatics & Robotics
Cambridge Antibody Technology
The Science Park, Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, UK
http://www.CambridgeAntibody.com/
mailto:simon.brocklehurst@CambridgeAntibody.com
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