[Bioclusters] Re: Announcing iNquiryXTE: A Mac OS X desktop application interface to an iNquiry cluster

[Catherine Letondal]

Hi,

On May 25, 2005, at 6:24 PM, William Van Etten wrote:

> First, realize that this was simply a demonstration of the sort of 
> thing that's possible having a web services API to iNquiry.
> I hadn't really considered this to be something "beefy" and broadly 
> capable, but I suppose it could turn into that.
>
> Second, I sort of cheated in the development of this app, making it 
> rather Pise-centric.
> I ported Catherine Leotondal's PiseParser to ObjC and used it to parse 
> Pise XML descriptions of the applications
> being served by iNquiry's web interface. The UI and client-side web 
> service calls are generated from these XML.
>
> {Actually we do the same sort of thing in reverse on the server side 
> to make the web services.}
>
> So I guess, with a Pise description of MOBY, EBI, eUtils,
> you could get these to work with zero development (apart from writing 
> the XML).

This is planned (see the DTD of the next version of Pise), and we are 
working on it. We intend to rely on Yan Wong's Python API for biomoby 
for this purpose 
(http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/software/BioMoby-Python.tar.bz2). Yan 
worked in cooperation with us last year for his Master's project. He 
has already written the code that builds a biomoby Web service template 
based on the Pise/XML description of this service,

> A more portable development solution might have been to generate the 
> UI and client-side web service calls from a WSDL.
> Version 2.0.

I agree that this would avoid to write > 100 XML descriptions for all 
the available biomoby services :-)


	Catherine