Soaplab is a tool that can automatically generate and deploy Web Services on top of existing command-line analysis programs. It is especially well suited for applications with well described input and output parameters, such as EMBOSS, a package of Open Source software for sequence analysis. It allows integration of many applications within a single programming interface.

Soaplab was developed in the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), within the eScience initiative, as a component of the myGrid project.

Soaplab uses a service specification based on other approved specifications, (see the Architecture Guide). It can create two types of Web Service; Analysis Service and Derived Analysis Service. While the former allows users to send input data as weakly typed name-value pairs, the later has strongly typed methods for sending input data and receiving results. The EBI has Soaplab service running on top of several tens of analyses (most of them coming from EMBOSS ).

Soaplab can also interoperate with other Web Services and can create Web Services on top of existing web resources (e.g. extracting data from a third-party web page and providing its data as a Web Service). Soaplab modules for this purpose were developed under the sub-project Gowlab.

Soaplab was developed in Java and uses Apache Axis to create Java implementation classes and deployment descriptors for all Derived Analysis Services. The server side installation (the place where the Web Services are running) requires also Perl, and it was developed and tested for UNIX.

A number of Soaplab services are running (and are maintained) at the EBI Soaplab site.

Soaplab

What it solves

An executive summary who can benefit from using Soaplab can be expressed in three following questions. If you answer them affirmatively then Soaplab can help you:

1. You have (or someone else has) one or more command-line programs (analysis tools) to offer
2. You wish to access them from other computers, eventually over the Internet
3. You wish to access them using your (or someone else’s) client programs, not just by filling the forms and clicking on web pages

Also, the Soaplab will work for you with the modified first question: You wish to grab (screen-scrape) data from a web page (more about this in the Gowlab sub-project).

You do not need to be a programmer in order to benefit from Soaplab. The Soaplab generates everything needed for creating and running your Web services from description files (which you have to create).

Soaplab

What's New

October 2006

EBI Soaplab service was extended by adding services for EMBOSS-4. New services are documented in EMBRACE projects wiki page for the WP2.

17th June 2005

Soaplab moved to SourceForge. The CVS repository changed - see details in the Download page.

25th April 2005

A fundamental change in Soaplab's service names had to be introduced: The up-to-now notation used to separate the category and real service name by two colons which was wrong because such service name did not comply with the URN specification but the older Axis toolkit did not mind. Starting with Axis 1.2RC2 it matters - so we had to replace colons in service name with a dot.

25th February 2005

Big update of the whole documentation, hopefully making it better.

December 2004

Many bug-fixes. Changed the way how you add new services to the already deployed ones (the distribution recognizes now a general Soaplab-core part, and individual packages with add-on services).

The Soaplab services on top of EMBOSS tools are now officially supported at EBI. You can ask for support and help using the helpdesk.

18th March 2004

Code was revamped to accomodate a new sub-project Gowlab. But the API remained the same. Soaplab uses now Ant for building and deploying services.

1st December 2003

Documentation revamped.

22nd April 2003

API has changed. This change was necessary because of the following reasons

1. the latest specification for WSDL does not anymore allow method overloading (so some methods in the Soaplab API has changed their names)
2. the metadata describing results needed to be richer in order to allow to express more semantics (so the method returning result metadata changed its signature)

Details are in CHANGELOG.

CHANGELOG

	Reference for Soaplab

Martin Senger, Peter Rice, Tom Oinn,
"Soaplab - a unified Sesame door to analysis tools",
Proceedings, UK e-Science, All Hands Meeting 2003, Editors - Simon J Cox,
p.509-513, ISBN - 1-904425-11-9,
September 2003