[Pipet Devel] GStreamer

J.W. Bizzaro bizzaro at geoserve.net
Sat Jan 29 22:50:42 EST 2000


Gary Van Domselaar wrote:
> 
> Sound a little like Loci?  Check out the GStreamer 'Editor' screenshot!

I'm a step ahead of you, Gary, since I mentioned GStreamer a couple months ago
:-)  But it wasn't hosted at SourceForge at that time.  (BTW, it's shocking
how many projects have moved to SourceForge over the last month or so.)

The Editor does look like our Workspace (Gtk+ interface), although I think we
did a much better job at designing an intuitive (what is CRDPP?) and flexible
(icons and windowlets) system.

GStreamer is an important example of how programs can be piped for 'streaming'
vs. 'step-wise' data flow.  Our original plan for Loci was to make a system
for step-wise data flow, meaning the data would be passed from the first
application to the second, _only_ when the first application has stopped. 
This would work well for most bioinformatics applications (e.g., you run BLAST
and _then_ get the results).  But for media applications you need streaming
(e.g., audio gets filtered _while_ it is being played).

This is why lately I've been think of Loci as a 'connectivity broker': not
dictating what protocol (CORBA, HTTP, etc.) should be used, but allowing the
user to make the best or most appropriate connection.  As Gary pointed out to
me, it would be overkill to force the output of 'ls' as input into 'grep'
using CORBA, when a simple UNIX pipe would work.  The same would go for
getting an HTML page from a Web server: Would we require that the Web server
first be wrapped in CORBA before it can work with Loci?

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
                      |                                  |
                      |           THE OPEN LAB           |
                      |    Open Source Bioinformatics    |
                      |                                  |
                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
                      +----------------------------------+




More information about the Pipet-Devel mailing list