Konrad Hinsen wrote: > > No, just in languages that are linkable with C, i.e. almost all! > No problem. I am using Fortran routines called from Python regularly. > The only complication is that C/Fortran linking is machine dependent, > which makes automatic installation difficult (but not impossible). Great! I'm glad to hear you have experience with that; we'll need it. Automatic installation on various platforms will not be easy especially considering all of the libraries we will be using! > Expect is a bit of a kludge, but I agree that it can be useful for > really weird programs (i.e. Pascal or Java, or binary-only > distributions). Exactly. I was considering (1) weird languages and (2) binary-only, especially for non-core tools that someone may want to sell or have the code kept hidden. > CORBA would be useful if there were programs with > CORBA support that we want to call, but I'd be surprised if that were > the case! Modifying these programs to use CORBA sounds like an > extremely unpleasant task. I think CORBA is becoming much more popular now. GNOME is a good example, which uses ORBit...GNU(?) CORBA. But, if you think it is not necessary, we will hold off on it. > Fnorb has one problem: it is not free for everyone, just for > non-commercial use. I did not know that. Hmmmm. That rules that out. > > > Also, check out what I wrote about using a "Glyphic Command Language" > > for the workspace: > > An interesting idea. Unfortunately I know much too little about the > applications we are aiming at to judge how useful it would be! > Could you give some fictitious example? Well, I was considering it for the workspace, which I see as virtual laboratory benchtop where you can organize your equipment (tools) and specimens (data). It won't matter what the tools and data are, GCL is just a way to organize them and generate a flow-chart for the experiment (analysis). The important features of GCL are (1) being able to form an input dialog with a tool. For example, "SEQUENCEALIGNER--ALIGN--SEQ-(to)-DATABASE". You see, this can be represented as 4 glyphs on the benchtop. And if you represent all 4 together as a single glyph, you can then start forming classic UNIX-like redirects and pipes, etc. In other words, you can do more than one thing with a single "line" of commands. It may be just kind of cute for one-shot analyses, but if you have an analysis that will take days, why not have TULIP go ahead and do something else when it finishes at 3:00AM Saturday morning? :-) Jeff -- J.W. Bizzaro Phone: 617-552-3905 Boston College mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu Department of Chemistry http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/ --