Simon Twigger @ MCW

My current obession is learning and using the Ruby programming language, both for web appls (using Rails) and in general as an alternative to perl. I did some webservice stuff today and its incredibly easy, you can try this in the irb

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'
wsdl = 'http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/wsdl/WSDbfetch.wsdl'
driver = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(wsdl).create_rpc_driver
puts driver.getSupportedDBs()

This three line snippet calls the WSDbfetch service [...]

In an idle moment at the MOBY-DIC meeting last weekend (developers meeting for the BioMOBY project), I downloaded the list of service authorities from MOBY-Central and hunted down their latitude and longitude coordinates using their IP addresses and various online ip-to-latlong servers. I threw all this data into a free Flash mapping tool (DIY Map) and out came a map of where in the world are the MOBY services.