Subject: Re: CCL:Sequence Classes and CORBA Servers

From: "Bill Kraus" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 09:54:56 -0800

>Jeroen Coppieters <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> OO has been around for a long time (and has been thought to undergrads
for
>> ages). Many developers of scientific software (both academic and
>> commercial) are well educated in OO. On the other hand many life science
>> researchers have been thinking about objects, long before OO became
>> fashionable.
>
>Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]> writes:

>Maybe other branches of life sciences are more up to date, but in the
>field I am familiar with (protein modelling), I couldn't name any
>widely used tool based on OO technology, much less any published
>OO interface used by more than one software supplier. Yes, there
>are OO libraries etc. for certain applications, but they are used
>only by a handful of people.
>
>> world. I agree that innovative work happens in academic groups and small
>> companies. But that does not mean that a standard interface for common
>> objects would restrain that research. There is a core of entities, that
>
>It might prove insufficient and would then not be used at all.
>

I must add my support to what Konrad is saying. As a commercial software
developer who has written bioinformatics apps (e.g. MacVector, AssemblyLIGN)
as well as others (e.g. Adobe PageMill), and as someone who has been
architecting systems using OO technology for the last ten years (even doing
time at the ill-fated Taligent effort), using OO technology is no guarantee.
In fact, it's been my experience that there is a significant risk to
standardizing object interfaces - the resulting APIs can either be too
constraining or so generalized as to be useless.

Although Jeroen states that many developers of scientific software may be
"well educated in OO", the proof is in the pudding - many of the systems
I've seen may have been OO, but were not well architected (e.g. suffered
from lack of transitive closure, used multiple inheritance inappropriately),
and as a result could not be easily extended.

Standards are a good thing, but the standardization must come at a level
where it creates opportunities, not restricts them.