bbgm - the discussion - Latest Comments in Another wish for life science APIs and web services

Re: Another wish for life science APIs and web services

mndoci — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:24:20 -0000

That's worth a rant in itself. Funding models are critical to take the capital costs and hardware maintenance issues out of the picture. The other issue is a more fundamental one and it's why I don't think academics should keep software locked up (even it if is open source in theory), but make it available via sourceforge, google code, etc. Still doesn't solve the problem, but it's a start.

Thing is, most academic software is badly written (I've worked with enough to know by now), so what's the solution? People don't want to pay for software, and web services are not something you can download and deploy most of the time. Is the solution to hire young programmers? The turnover rate will be too high.

Or perhaps informatics types will learn REAL software engineering.

Re: Another wish for life science APIs and web services

harijay — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:06:19 -0000

What’s keeping academics from setting up servers on the cloud other than funding models?
I dont think the cloud is the answer to having software work well on the web. It all maintenance. Most academic projects run out of funding , or the grad student/postdoc maintainer leaves the lab.
As a result you have broken web pages and stalled web jobs!

Re: Another wish for life science APIs and web services

mndoci — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:16:28 -0000

Egon,

I agree. Basically the point is that we should use commonly available mechanisms to distribute code, rather than put them into this ether.

Re: Another wish for life science APIs and web services

Egon Willighagen — Sun, 18 May 2008 14:23:26 -0000

Regarding the source code repository, I think Linux distributions provide good options here. Ensuring that your software is available in the Debian/RedHat/etc repository provides an excellent way to ensure your software is available, portable, easy to install etc. I strongly recommend this to any open source science project.