Asynchronous services

Asynchronous services, first day (Feb 11th)

Initial topics, in their original order, were:

• Is it worth  WSRF?
• Is it worth for short (aka fast), easy services, to become an asynchronous service?
• Is it easy from the service developer's point of view to create/develop the needed infrastructure for an asynchronous web service?
• Is it easy from the client developer's point of view to deal with an asynchronous web service?

We were taking into account the different web services paradigms used in bioinformatics, and also projects and major service providers we knew with some asynchronous capability. So, the additional topic was introduced by Matthew Pocock:

• How are asynchronous services being implemented in our projects just now?

We agreed that main web services paradigms used in bioinformatics are  REST,  SOAP+ WSDL,  SoapLab 1 &  SoapLab 2, and  BioMOBY. Meanwhile we were discussing we identified some major service providers which have implemented or want to implement asynchronous services:  DDBJ WABI,  PDBj,  EBI-EMBOSS (which uses SoapLab?),  EMBRACE NoE and  InstantSOAP. We were quite sure that NCBI provides such services, but we did not have any attending people who came from NCBI which could confirm it.  INB has also some  BioMOBY asynchronous services, but they were not mentioned in that moment.

Then, we were talking about WSRF implementation in BioMOBY, and in general asynchronous models. These topics drove us to the next one (pointed by Matthew):

• Which asynchronous model is better, a polling mechanism or a callback model?