[Pipet Devel] Re: standard API for ISYS, OpenBSA & Piper

[Adam C. Siepel]

Hi Jeff -- thanks for your interest ... I've been meaning to get in touch
with both you and the EBI folks with OpenBSA (whose poster I did study) but
have been busy since ISMB with some other stuff.  I agree that there's
potentially much room for collaboration.  I want to take a second look at
the material on both of your systems to develop a better idea of how we
might work together; as soon as I've done so, I'll try to respond in a less
superficial way.  In the meantime, I invite all of you to check out our
website at http://www.ncgr.org/research/isys.  The material there is
presented for a general audience, but there is some substance to be found
amid the hype.

In short, ISYS is a client-side platform that focuses on intuitive, visual
integration among user interface components.  It uses a decentralized,
bottom-up approach by which components can interoperate without being
"hardwired" together.  We're interested in doing pipelines but so far have
not done the necessary design work (a good reason to collaborate with you
folks).  Our model for distributed computing is restricted -- essentially,
server proxies pull resources from other servers into the client-side
environment, making it appear local.  Our platform and most of our
components are written in Java.  We're not using Beans because we're not
too interested in the use of IDEs for component assembly, but there's no
reason why our components couldn't be converted to Beans.  We've avoid use
of XML for data exchange among client-side components for performance
reasons but there's no reason why components shouldn't provide external
interfaces based on XML.

Adam Siepel



J.W. Bizzaro writes:
 > Okay, I have created a mailing list on our server for discussing standards
 > between us.  The name of the list is "DNP-API", which stands for "Distributed
 > Network of Programs API".
 > 
 > It is a Mailman mailing list, and you can subscribe via the Web:
 > 
 >   http://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/dnp-api
 > 
 > See you there :-)
 > 
 > Jeff
 > -- 
 > J.W. Bizzaro                                           jeff at bioinformatics.org
 > Director, Bioinformatics.org: The Open Lab     http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
 > "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
 >                -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
 > --
 > 

-- 
Adam Siepel                                 phone:  (505)982-7840
IT Program Leader, Integration              fax:    (505)995-4432
National Center for Genome Resources        WWW:    http://www.ncgr.org
2935 Rodeo Park Drive East                  e-mail: acs at ncgr.org
Santa Fe, NM 87505