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

[Alan J. Williams]

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, J.W. Bizzaro wrote:
 > 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.
I came across the thread and am in agreement.

 > 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.
So it is important that viewers (and possibly the figure builder) be able
to not only present to the screen, but present to paper (postscript?), and
present to graphics (PNG or JPEG). Of course ghostscript will convert
postscript to PNG,JPEG,...

 > > This is why the data access/storage needs to have good/general
 > > abstraction.
And it is also why the workflow, notebook, etc ... all need to have an xml
representation.

 > 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?
Yep. An xml document workspace!?

************************************************************************  
Alan Williams           
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University of California, Riverside   "Where observation is concerned,
Dept. of Botany and Plant Sciences     chance favors the prepared mind."  
Alan at TheWilliamsFamily.org                         -- Louis Pasteur
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