Workshop at TIGR produces first web services

The US branch is meeting at TIGR for the kickoff workshop, and after one day of Perl hacking the first web service was published.

The workshop started off by implementing some "HelloWorld" and "Echo" services using the BioMoby Perl libraries, and already on the first day Saran Palaniswamy had his first production service on the web: getAGRISTFFamilyNameByAGI. This looks up the transcription factor family for a given AGI locus code from AGRIS.

On the next day, the Jmoby libraries for developing services in Java were introduced, and by now all participants are happily hacking away at services.

Inspired by this environment, Mark Wilkinson, founding father of BioMoby, sat down and completely reworked the Perl utilities for service provision, making it even easier and reducing the required code to 9 lines.

In between, workflows and use cases that will be important to the scientific community were discussed, e.g. services that allow querying all publications for an Arabidopsis gene, retrieving expression data from microarrays or images of tissue-specific gene expression. See Services for a list of web services created by this project.