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Lecture 9, part 2 of 4
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Databases and Web Services

As we will see today, a major trend in bioinformatics is the proliferation of web services. Web services are the logical next step. Whereas databases decentralize the storage and organization of information, web services offload many computing tasks to other systems. The major developments in web services for bioinformatics are an outgrowth of the open computing concept, in that services are developed using open source software, and made available to the research world at no charge.

For today's lecture: Don't just think about how you might use web data and web services. Think about how you might contribute knowledge from your specialized field, in the form of data and web services, to the growing "semantic web".

1. Client/Server interfaces

To simplify access of data from remote locations, client/server protocols are used. The

a. FTP - File Transfer Protocol

Email is not the best way to move files across the network, if for no other reason than the fact that it requires human intervention at both ends.

It might seem obvious, but the ability to download or upload files across a network is important, because it's often more useful to have locally-installed copies of databases.  Local copies are useful for projects in which rapid retrieval of large numbers of sequences are important, such as creating database subsets. FTP is a special case of the more general Client/Server model.


FTP programs that use Secure Shell (ssh) protocols for encrypted file transfer:

Unix/Linux/Mac
sftp - command line program

Windows, Mac, Linux
Filezilla - (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla  

download - move files from a remote machine to your local machine
upload - move files from your local machine to a remote machine

Why have local copies of databases?

b.  Interactive client/server programs

FTP is one special case of the more general client/server model. A more typical case is the NCBI BLAST+. These are the standalone BLAST programs (including blastp, blastn, tblastn, blastx and tblastx) that can run on any computer. By default, the BLAST+ programs search local copies of NCBI databases. However, if run with the -remote  command line option, they send the query to the NCBI, and the results return to your local machine, as if you had run the search locally.


BLAST+  example

The following command will search for a sequence in the NCBI GenBank non-redundant (nr) protein database:

blastp -remote -query PEADRRB.pro.fsa -db nr -out PEADRRB.blastp

This command tells blastp to send a sequence to the NCBI Blast server, and run the search using blastp to search the non-redundant protein database. At the server end, the Blast server runs the search and sends the data back to the client, which writes the output stream to a file. Transactions between client and server are carried out using the common internet protocol TCP/IP.

  • Transactions can only occur through remote server

  • In the client/server model the only way to send or receive data to or from the database is with clients specifically written for the particular server program that talks to the database. This is good, in terms of system reliability, because potentially, databases that are updated by user transactions could conflict, which might result in a corrupt database. On the other hand, the requirement for going through a specific server program may limit the kind of things you can do with the database


  • Tasks can be strategically divided between Client and Server

  • The Client/Server model provides an opportunity to offload some tasks to the client. For example, most of the work of the user interface is best done at the Client end. In particular, rendering of graphics would be slow if done at the server and then transferred to the Client.


    Example: Jalview multiple alignment viewer

    Jalview [http://www.jalview.org/] is a Java program that runs on the user's computer. Its main onboard functions are for visualizing multiple sequence alignments. However, Jalview extends its functionality by running web services. These services include:
    In the example below, a secondary structure prediction was done by the JNet service. Secondary structure results are displayed below the sequence alignment. For example, α helices are shown as red tubes, and β sheets as green arrows.


    2. Web interfaces

    Web interfaces to remote databases are often easy to implement, and are easy to use. They are easy to implement because minimal software development needs to be done at the client end. The client is simply the Web browser. All the work is done at the server end. The trick is to get HTTP requests translated into a form the database software can understand, and to convert output from the database program into  HTML and graphics.
     


     

    The figure shows that as with all Web pages, the HTTP daemon httpd receives an HTTP request, which is processed by a CGI script. A CGI script contains instructions for running programs at the server end. In this case, the CGI script would run programs that call the database software, asking for the requested data. The data is returned to the script, which runs further programs to create HTML and graphics. The HTML and graphics are sent to httpd, which passes them on to the remote Web client.

    Example of a link that calls CGI scripts:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/viewer.fcgi?db=nucleotide&val=AA960716&report=GenBank

    This URL passes commands to the Entrez server at NCBI to retrieve from the GenBank nucleotide database the entry whose ACCESSION number is AA960716.

    The organization of tasks makes it possible to use almost any database software at the server end, without modification. The CGI scripts and associated programs, along with httpd, act as "middleware", between client and server. Even if, at some later time, the structure of the database changes, or a different database program is used, only a small amount of code needs to be rewritten. The user can be given exactly the same view of the data, regardless of what changes have been made to the database itself.

    There are several important limitations to Web interfaces. First, web pages display one page at a time. Every time a web page is updated, the whole page must be redrawn. Updating a page is often accompanied by additional transactions between client and server, which may result in further delays. Furthermore, Web browsers are usually oriented to a single window. Users move from one window to the next, rather than having multiple windows displayed simultaneously. Each browser window carries a substantial deal of processing overhead.

    3. Java Web Clients

    a. The Java language - "Write Once, Run Anywhere"

    Java is an object-oriented programming language designed at Sun Microsystems, and now supported by Oracle . It is popular for many reasons, one of them being that it was specifically designed to be platform-independent. Platform independence is accomplished in two ways. First, the specification of the language has no platform-specific dependencies. That is, there are no calls to programs or libraries specific to any particular operating system. For example, Java contains its own procedures for drawing windows, rather than relying on system-specific libraries. Secondly, Java applications are compiled (translated) into machine code that runs in the Java Virtual machine (JVM). JVM maps Java instructions to actual machine instructions. JVM can be thought of as an emulated computer - a computer that runs as software rather than hardware. Therefore,  JVM needs to be adapted for each computer system on which Java will run. Since JVM is now available for essentially all computer platforms, Java programs can run, unmodified, on all platforms.

    On Linux systems,  for example, Java applications might be displayed by the Xfce window manager, and some X11 calls might be issued by the JVM to create windows. The kernel, ultimately, executes all instructions emulated in the JVM.

    b. Java applets

    The Java Virtual Machine, JVM, is surprisingly small. Therefore, the major Web browsers include a JVM that allows them to run Java "applets". Applets are Java applications that are downloaded from a server at runtime, but run in a local JVM, by the Web browser. As a security measure, the JVM is implemented as a "sandbox",  that is,  a virtual machine that can not read or write anywhere except in a protected area of memory. No disk files can be read or written, and no instructions can be executed outside of the sandbox. In contrast, normal Java applications, run from an user's account, can execute with the same read and write capabilitiies of any other program.


     

    Example: The 3D structure of the nucleosome can also be viewed using Java applets at The Protein Data Bank

    http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore/explore.do?structureId=2CV5


    Advantages

     

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