[Pipet Devel] An apology, Loci, gnome, and CORBA

[J.W. Bizzaro]

"Alan J. Williams" wrote:
> 
> I've toyed with using bioperl and writing an apache mod_perl system for
> doing bioinformatics, but you can only do so much through that medium.
> Non-the-less, it would be great if the underlying infrastructure of loci
> could be utilized through a mod_perl or cgi interface should someone
> decide to implement a web interface down the road.

You see, we are thinking about the same thing.  We discussed doing just this a
few months back.  Rahul volunteered to take the "Web interface" on.  The idea
is, if we are going to create a communication network for lots of command-line
tools, why not let people tap into parts of it (what can be tapped into) with a
Web browser.  It may actually answer the portability problem to some extent: If
you can't run Unix/Linux, try the Web interface.

My thoughts were that a CGI interface could control what the Workspace might
control.  So everything in the Workspace that would require user input, would
instead bring up an HTML form.  And everything that would return an figure,
would convert the figure to GIF or JPEG and make an HTML page for it.

>  > As we are making use of GNOME, I would agree that it makes sense to use
>  > their technology for these things. It makes all of the tools more
>  > flexible in the GNOME environment.
> Agreed.

Me too.  If we aren't going 100% Python, we need to look at other toolsets, and
Gnome puts it all together in a nice little package.

>  > However, there has to be some flexibility in the interface (to the data in
>  > particular). What if I want to make a tool that uses data in a unique way
>  > (which we don't have an interface for)?
> This is why the data access/storage needs to have good/general
> abstraction.

Yeah.  The general idea is that we can plug in new components to manage new data
types.  This will in the long run make Loci a general purpose...whatchamacallit,
but maybe more of a thingamajiggy or even a thingamabob ;-)  There isn't a name
for this sort of thing, is there?


Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                  mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu
Boston College Chemistry      http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/
--