Om Malik, in a post about the Office 2.0 conference, mentions the launches of Teqlo and Coghead. Both provide web-based application development environments aimed at non-experts. This is part of the trend of enabling easy web application development that I blogged about a few days ago. The idea of building web services and rolling them out without necessarily being a grade A programmer is not a bad idea, although it does come with a bunch of caveats, many of which are brought up on Techcrunch. There are questions that I have, e.g. does this mean that most applications will look the same, or is there a level of flexibility that will allow the developer to add their own unique stamp. I also worry about quality, but I am sure the people behind these apps, like Jeff Nolan know what they are doing.
Teqlo and Coghead are certainly not aimed at the bioinformatics and scientific computing space, but go one step further than something like Pipeline Pilot, by taking development directly to the web, which automatically means broader distribution. In fact I would argue that such applications have more utility with scientists. After all, aren’t scientists used to setting up experiments, identifying protocols, etc. As a subsection of bioinformatics becomes the domain of the “bench” scientist, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had an environment that allowed a core set of developers to deploy components on the web and for scientists to then pull these components together in a way that was appropriate for their work. Taking my habit of connecting random dots even further, doesn’t this scream for data standards. If standards were in place, the scientist would not have to worry about I/O, just about the science. The world is several years from such a scenario, partly because of the lack of standards (unlike the web), but it would be a fun place to be as a scientist. Of course, not all science is amenable to such a model, but a key subset, e.g. sequence analysis, structure prediction, etc would fit that model very well. That would leave the more complex application development (visualization, algorithms, data management, numerical computing, etc) to the expert “computational” scientists.
Web services made easy round 2
Om Malik, in a post about the Office 2.0 conference, mentions the launches of Teqlo and Coghead. Both provide web-based application development environments aimed at non-experts. This is part of the trend of enabling easy web application development that I blogged about a few days ago. The idea of building web services and rolling them out without necessarily being a grade A programmer is not a bad idea, although it does come with a bunch of caveats, many of which are brought up on Techcrunch. There are questions that I have, e.g. does this mean that most applications will look the same, or is there a level of flexibility that will allow the developer to add their own unique stamp. I also worry about quality, but I am sure the people behind these apps, like Jeff Nolan know what they are doing.
Teqlo and Coghead are certainly not aimed at the bioinformatics and scientific computing space, but go one step further than something like Pipeline Pilot, by taking development directly to the web, which automatically means broader distribution. In fact I would argue that such applications have more utility with scientists. After all, aren’t scientists used to setting up experiments, identifying protocols, etc. As a subsection of bioinformatics becomes the domain of the “bench” scientist, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had an environment that allowed a core set of developers to deploy components on the web and for scientists to then pull these components together in a way that was appropriate for their work. Taking my habit of connecting random dots even further, doesn’t this scream for data standards. If standards were in place, the scientist would not have to worry about I/O, just about the science. The world is several years from such a scenario, partly because of the lack of standards (unlike the web), but it would be a fun place to be as a scientist. Of course, not all science is amenable to such a model, but a key subset, e.g. sequence analysis, structure prediction, etc would fit that model very well. That would leave the more complex application development (visualization, algorithms, data management, numerical computing, etc) to the expert “computational” scientists.
With that we end this session on pipe dreams
Technorati Tags: Web Services, Web Applications, CogHead, Teqlo, Bioinformatics, Visual Programming, Science, Data Standards
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