On 13 April 2010 13:02, Christian Meisenbichler <christian.meisenbich...@mu-leoben.at> wrote: > Is someone interested in creating an openbabel web service?
It sounds like you are! :-) But seriously, it's a great idea. I've never gotten around to doing it myself, but we really should have one plus a web site frontend. See how Markus has set up the Chemical Identifier Resolver as a REST-based webservice (http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/chemical/structure, and his blog for background). In the past, it has just accepted string formats (e.g. InChI, SMILES) but going forward it's going to accept files. If you are planning to do this (and I would encourage you to go ahead), we can link to it from the wiki and give it a virtual home at openbabel.org/whatever. Where the actual home goes will depend on the required resources - if we can get a proof of concept going that would be the first thing (as Tim says). We can then starting thinking about how to deploy it for mass use. > Let me explain what I mean by that. I Just recently got convinced by > the idea of software as a service and the practical elegance of > knitting together various parts of software by http requests. > Openbabel as a converter tool would just be perfect for such a > service. Sure - I completely agree. Google "webel cinfony" for an example of a cheminformatics toolkit that runs only on webservices. > The service would accept a http post request with the file to convert > as post data. The source and target file format is encoded in the URI > and the request returns the converted file. > As there are already python bindings, a simple python http request > handler that provides this service is something I would quite like to > implement. Question is if there is someone who would be interested to > host such a service? Maybe even as a part of the open babel project? > Motivation of course is that one sometimes wants to use openbabel > functionality but it is for some reason impossible or impractical to > install it or deal with the dependencies. In such an situation the > script or application must only be able to issue an http request. I > think thats utterly elegant. > > What do you think? Bring it on. But do think about the API at least as much as the technical aspects. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval > Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs > proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. > See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev > _______________________________________________ > OpenBabel-discuss mailing list > OpenBabel-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-discuss > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ OpenBabel-discuss mailing list OpenBabel-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-discuss
