Webservice access from the applet

Hi,

It says on the website that you can’t call alignment webservices from the applet version of Jalview - is this due to Java’s security model, or just that the applet is intended as a lighter weight viewer-only version? A bit of background: I work at a biotech, and am trying to make it a bit easier for people to share alignment data internally - my first thought was, stick the applet in a web-page with some controls for loading / saving projects to a central database (mostly to avoid subtley different versions of the data lying about on different machines) but this loses the ability to call jabaws services.

So, if the webservices are missing from the applet because somewhere a flag is set to leave them out and I can rebuild it with them in, that would be great, but if it’s a serious amount of work, then we can just get people to run the full app.

Thanks,

Fred

Hi There, Fred.

The reason we never included the webservices client in the applet was indeed that it’s intended to be a lightweight visualization tool, and when Jalview 2 was first released, the applet was created by cutting down the desktop GUI to make it smaller and faster. The SOAP clients in the original code needed a bunch of XML libraries that weren’t available in the browser, so we decided to skip out the alignment functionality entirely.

It is currently a fair amount of work to add the alignment and analysis functionality - but I am currently working towards a new architecture that would make it much easier to add in new analysis functionality in the applet (basically, I’m unifying the gui classes so - if you wish - you can simply add in the additional analysis/service clients and they will appear in the applet’s gui) - if you’re interested in helping with this then please get in contact!

Jim.

Hi Fred,

I do not think this is the problem technically any more. With Java 6 on the clients and the JABAWS web services it should be perfectly possible to add web services client into the applet. It will probably going make applet about 150Kb bigger than it is at the moment, for some applet users this may be undesirable, for others it would not be an issue. I guess the main problem at the moment is to resource this work. If you have some spare time you could have a go. (:-))

Regards,
Peter