[Pipet Devel] DOM/gdome update

Justin Bradford justin at ukans.edu
Fri Jul 9 23:37:24 EDT 1999


I've contacted the author of gdome, and am actively tracking its
development. Unfortunately, little is being done with it currently. Most
of its development is being driven by gill (an SVG application).

Anyway, I've talked to the primary author of gdome. His plans for the
sliding DOM have been set aside, and they are currently concentrated on
implementing a straight DOM interface over CORBA. He was very interested
in my ideas on a simple wire protocol (something that would not require
CORBA, necessarily), and I'll be getting back to him with a proposal for
an intelligent client-side gdome interface (which resolves many of the
problems with DOM over CORBA).

However, the first priority for this side of development is probably
python bindings to CORBA. I'll be checking into that this weekend. With
the new design, supposedly new language bindings are not too difficult.
Hopefully, I can get something working soon which will allow use of
GNOME's CORBA stuff. We can use the convential gdome system for the
interim, and eventually, the new, more efficient (but not quite
traditional DOM) interface will be available for implementing our various
tools.

Is everyone ok with the idea of a centralized gdome system holding the
Loci data? Plugins (viewers, editors, etc) all deal with the data via the
gdome interface. It offers some very cool benefits with little (Loci
unique) code, so as event notification, locking, etc.

I've been busy at Genentech lately, but I just wrapped up a project, so I
can hopefully do something for Loci now, besides write emails about what
I'm going to do ;)

And for anyone who cares, Genentech (the original biotech company, based 
in San Francisco) is a very cool place. And it looks like they're going to
give me a job next January, and probably pay for grad school.  The
bioinformatics/biocomputing departments are expanding rapidly for anyone
looking for jobs :)

Justin





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