Joshua Shachter has a pretty interesting blog post about blogging tools, one that makes a lot of sense and appeals to a bunch of instincts. In the post, Joshua talks about the separate pieces that make up a blogging system and how they can be served up. In other words, you don’t have to create one complete piece of software, but use existing components to create a blog authoring and serving package. He writes
I wonder if there is a way to define loose interfaces between these systems so that they could both work together but also not set APIs in concrete solid enough to stop innovation. Because the various pieces of the systems currently are all tightly bound together, it is very hard for the parts to move forward separately. For example, I’ve wanted to be able to specifically reply to comments in place in a visually differentiated way as the publisher, rather than just as another commenter. But this feature hasn’t emerged, and if I hacked it into one platform via plugins, I’d be stuck with it forever.
One of the reasons systems like Pipeline Pilot were successful was the ability to take best of breed software or at least a suite of applications that you like to use together and build a workflow that worked for you. I think we can extend that concept even further, combining the best of what we have learned from the web development world over the past few years with the best practices of scientific workflows. This also speaks to Cameron’s question on social software for scientists. I talked about this in the yet to be released Coast to Coast Bio #30, and it speaks to Joshua’s point as well. We have the ability to bring together a diverse set of APIs and tools that allow us to accomplish a task or set of tasks. The focus should be on the resources, whether they actually exist, if there are any we can reuse and the kinds of APIs that make sense.
So will we ever have such resources? Will we ever have publishing tools that take a bunch of components that allow us to express ourselves scientifically, or perform computational science using a workflow that makes sense to us? I think we will, and perhaps sooner than some might think.
I also think we will, soon. Everywhere I look in web apps and APIs, I see the phrase "small pieces, loosely coupled", or some variant of it. It must be filtering down to even scientific software developers.
Loosely coupled tools
Joshua Shachter has a pretty interesting blog post about blogging tools, one that makes a lot of sense and appeals to a bunch of instincts. In the post, Joshua talks about the separate pieces that make up a blogging system and how they can be served up. In other words, you don’t have to create one complete piece of software, but use existing components to create a blog authoring and serving package. He writes
One of the reasons systems like Pipeline Pilot were successful was the ability to take best of breed software or at least a suite of applications that you like to use together and build a workflow that worked for you. I think we can extend that concept even further, combining the best of what we have learned from the web development world over the past few years with the best practices of scientific workflows. This also speaks to Cameron’s question on social software for scientists. I talked about this in the yet to be released Coast to Coast Bio #30, and it speaks to Joshua’s point as well. We have the ability to bring together a diverse set of APIs and tools that allow us to accomplish a task or set of tasks. The focus should be on the resources, whether they actually exist, if there are any we can reuse and the kinds of APIs that make sense.
So will we ever have such resources? Will we ever have publishing tools that take a bunch of components that allow us to express ourselves scientifically, or perform computational science using a workflow that makes sense to us? I think we will, and perhaps sooner than some might think.