Re: [ccp4bb] CCP4 for iphones

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 2/25/11 5:41 PM, Nat Echols wrote: On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Sean Seaver <s...@p212121.com> wrote: I've been curious if there has been discussion about moving data processing and refinement to a software as a service (SaaS) deployment.  If programs were web accessible then it may save researchers time and trouble (maintaining and installing software).  In turn, one could then process data via their iphone. The computational demand would be enormous and personally have a hard time even doing a back of the envelope calculation.  The demand could be offset such as by limiting jobs or the number of users, etc...  It will be interesting to see how mobile plays a role in crystallography. SBGrid has done something like this for massively parallel MR searches: https://portal.nebiogrid.org/secure/apps/wsmr/ But that's a massively parallel and highly distributed calculation, which isn't what crystallographers do most of the time.  Nor do they need to be particularly mobile in an era of remote synchrotron data collection. Nat, thanks for commenting on this.  As the person who has developed it, I'm glad someone has noticed the connection between the web-based application (well, really just an application wrapper, since it uses CCP4 software underneath) and what it is actually doing behind the scenes.  It seems to us (within SBGrid) that there are quite a few applications that can benefit from access to large scale computational infrastructure.  Sometimes having that resource available will allow people to ask new questions or pose old questions in a new way.  We're always happy to talk to people who have ideas for new computational workflows or applications that can benefit from 10s of thousands of compute cores or that process TB of data.  And of course the underlying resources are available to others to access themselves (see another post I made on this same thread about an hour ago). I have a lot of other objections to the idea of doing everything as a webapp, but that's a separate rant.  I do, however, like the idea of using multi-touch interfaces for model-building, but you need something at least the size of an iPad for that to be more productive than using a traditional computer with a mouse. I agree that not everything should be done as a web app.  When high-functionality UI features are required, developing these with CSS, jQuery, AJAX, HTML5, Java, etc. is super time consuming, compared with conventional integrated UI toolkits (Tcl/TK, Qt, Cocoa, .NET, etc.).  Similarly when significant "real-time" data processing is required, or if multiple applications are interacting with the same data, then the UI (graphical or otherwise) needs to be "close" to the user data, and not stuck messing around with web browsers (which can't really be scripted) and web forms. I got a 21" HP multi-touch screen last year to explore improved touch-based interfaces for structural biology applications, however it doesn't work (properly) under OS X, and I'm not inclined to shift to a Windows based environment to develop for it.  Hopefully some standard USB interfaces/drivers/libraries (events) will appear soon so the iPad and other tablets aren't the exclusive domain for touch-based applications. Ian