[Pipet Devel] and still more infrastructure things

[Justin Bradford]

> We're both late night or early morning people, huh? :-)

Yes, I think so. The damned Internet never lets me sleep anymore ;)

> > Concerning the dependency scheduling, it wouldn't be difficult to manage
> > this from a central server, as I was envisioning the wfs. If an object
> > roamed independently, it would be difficult to manage, unless we had it
> > all of the threads regroup when data needed to be rejoined.
> 
> Of course we can deal with this after we are comfortable with the basic wfs.

Well, I'm not sure this has been entirely answered. Will the wfs handle
all the analyses from a single centralized process? Or do you still want
for a decentralized analysis object (pathway), where each node sends the
object to the next node, rather than going back to the wfs each time?

> Yes.  We define dependencies as data, servers, and clients (loci).

What is the distinction between a client and server?
Is the wfs a client and the analysis tool (gatekeeper) a server?

> Is there really any such thing as an "XML object"?  I mean, XML is a
> way to save structured data as a _file_.  Python objects, on the other
> hand, are data structures in memory.  We would just be going back and
> forth between file and object using XML.

Yes. I just tend to think of the Paos object structured like the XML file.
I guess I was basically asking for a DOM interface.

> So, where do we really need XML?  Could the data just be a Python
> object?  If we need to save the object, I think it can just be "pickled"?

Well for internal network stuff, it makes sense to just use the Python
object. Like I said, I imagine it structured something like the XML file I
described earlier. Also, for saving a Loci analysis locally, I would
prefer to see it written out to an XML format. The conversion would be
fairly simple, anyway. Rather than an obscure, semi-binary format, why not
use an easy to read text format? It'll make it easier for non-Loci tools
to get information from our files, too.

But you're right, there's no reason to use XML for anything but files and
maybe drag and drop (but that's not important for now). I wasn't thinking
about that earlier. 

Can Paos support complex objects, though? Actually, can Python for that
matter? Can I have things status.analysis[5].message in both?

Justin Bradford
justin at ukans.edu