[Pipet Devel] more on Eazel

[Brad Chapman]

> "This summer, Eazel plans to begin offering a free user interface -- 
an
> icon-based software control system that can be downloaded from the
> Internet..."
> 
> Should we (Loci) be concerned?  It's based on Gnome too.

The article is kind of scary. This project is pretty hard 
core--they've got lots of really good designers working on it, they 
appear to be pretty buddy/buddy with the Gnome people, and they have a 
whole room full of cubicles set up for it (oh no!). 
    I don't think Loci has much to worry about from the 
bioinformatics standpoint, but it is really worrysome if we would want 
to imagine Loci as an "alternative" Gnome desktop. I don't think a few 
part time coders have much chance of competing with a powerful thing 
like this Eazel project, at least not if we are gunning for the same 
goals.
    Personally, I'd like to see Loci drop back off trying to be an all 
purpose desktop and focus more on bioinformatics specific stuff. It is 
just awfully intimidating for me to think about all of the code that 
will have to be churned out before Loci could be workable as a 
general workspace. Just focusing on bioinformatics stuff seems as 
least a little more imaginable.
    My vote (if we are voting :-) would be to have Loci be a corbafied 
GUI for lots of bioinformatics programs. I think if we focus on this 
we could get a lot of functionality quickly by interfacing with 
Bioperl/python/java through their new idl, could use the Sever half of 
AppLab for wrapping programs (for now) and could also look at the 
millions of corba interfaces being developed at EBI. This would give 
us something useful quicker, and then we could step back to look at 
other goals. Just my two cents on this...

Brad