[MOBY-l] RE: [Biojava-l] To Do Question

[Jason E. Stewart]

"David Block" <dblock@gnf.org> writes:

> BioMoby is in its infancy.  A Java client is certainly in the works;
> rolling your own will be trivial initially, since it is a standard
> SOAP service.  Hopefully the java client will be a library that you
> can plug in to your existing application, so that a right click in
> any application that has the plugin will get you access to the Moby
> central list of web services - and then let you launch the
> appropriate ones based on the data you have in your application (ie,
> I have a sequence, who can do something with it, and what can they
> do? - just from a right click).
> 
> I'll cross-post this to the biomoby list so the experts on both
> sides can get fertilized...

Hey David,

Thanks for cross-pollinating. 

It really matters not at all what language we are coding MOBY Central
in - its a service registry that speaks SOAP, so if people want a Java
client, then that's as easy to write as a Perl client. No wasted
effort.

For those that don't know about it, you should check out ISYS at
ncgr.org, which has had this type of capability for quite some time,
but using only local services, not remote ones. 

In terms of whether MOBY is redundant - yes, it probably is.

In terms of whether MOBY is a waste of time - no (especially since
some of us are funded to do research in it ;-), but more importantly I
think *web services* is in its infancy, not just MOBY. So having
multiple implementations out there is a Good Thing(tm). 

None of us know what we're doing, we don't know what's going to work
or what the community is going to need two years from now. Why not
have multiple implementations available so that we can test different
ideas. Personally, I want to make sure that there is a completely Open
solution available - open protocols and open code.

Cheers,
jas.

PS. that email thread was a good example of why one should always
include the original message text *above* one's own comments -
forte my not is backwards reading..