nodalpoint.org - Debugging Web Services - Comments

REST and recuperation

Duncan — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 06:00:59 -0400

Thanks Greg, I'm glad someone is enjoying my rambling posts to nodalpoint!

I don't know why there aren't more REST style services out there, why has everyone plumped for the "over-engineering" of SOAP+WSDL? Maybe its because many of these services are provided by large government-funded bodies like the NCBI and EBI who employ professional software engineers (not bioinformatics hackers) to deploy these services. Many software engineers like big complicatd over-engineered solutions that only they truly understand :)

I think the NCBI method of supplying both REST as well as SOAP+WSDL is a sensible one, you choose the interface that you like best, rather than the "one true interface"...

Firstly, thank you for all

Greg — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 23:10:44 -0400

Firstly, thank you for all these great posts, you're putting us regulars all to shame.

many publicly available biomedical services, are not the simpler RESTian type, but the more complex SOAP-and-WSDL type of web service.

For as long as I have been doing this I've always felt that most in-the-trenches bioinformatics hackers would be vehemently opposed to the over engineering that is SOAP+WSDL and prefer the intuitive and straight forward REST style. NCBI's EUtils looks like the only game in town if you want REST based webservices, everything else as you point out is based on SOAP. Why is that ?

Debugging Web Services

Duncan — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 09:06:28 -0400

There are a growing number of biomedical services out there on Wild Wild Web for performing various computations on DNA, RNA and proteins as well as the associated scientific literature. Currently, using and debugging these services can be hard work. SOAP UI (SOAP User Interface) is newish and handy free tool to help debug services and get your in silico experiments and analyses done, hopefully more easily.