[Pipet Devel] First release of the Snapper Development System

[Nile Geisinger]

>From what I can see, Snapper and BlueBox are very similar in that they send
over XML files to represent the program's interface. The main difference is
that Snapper is client side while BlueBox is server side.

1) Snapper sends over the PERL and Python files to run the program
2) BlueBox connects widgets on the client and code on the server

Snapper, in this way, serves the entire program to client. I assume the
algorithm is something like.

1) Connect to Server.
2) Download Perl, Python, and XML files
3) Create interface from XML files with libglade
4) Run the program

The best way to understand this is to think of the difference between a CGI
and Javascript on an HTML page.  The first runs on the server and serves an
interface(like BlueBox), the second runs on the client  and sends both the
interface and the program (like Snapper).

Both models complement each other nicely. I think this will have a very high
return for GNOME people if people use it. The article says it will be out on
Sept 15th,

I'm not sure this will be that helpful for Piper since its point is to have
several programs running on multiple servers (i.e., processing is server
side, not client), but it's worth investigating.

Nile

Peter van Heusden wrote:

> There is an interesting article on the GNOME news site about this Snapper
> thing. http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/968873979/
>
> Here's the first paragraph:
>
> "The Snapper Development System enables a Linux GTK+/Gnome application to
> be "beamed" to a user desktop or web appliance running Linux. Snapper
> works by embedding the application in an XML file, which can reside in a
> relational database or on a file or web server, and since the application
> is GTK+/Gnome based the user will enjoy the "look and feel", and speed of
> a native Linux program. By using this foundation the possibilities are
> endless."
>
> Sounds vaguely like BlueBox, without the cross platform stuff, or
> ALBeanBox with more precision in terms of GUI.
>
> Peter
> _______________/\/eGenetics.com\/\_______________
> Peter van Heusden                               pvh at egenetics.com
> Electric Genetics
>
> _______________________________________________
> pipet-devel maillist  -  pipet-devel at bioinformatics.org
> http://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/pipet-devel