Web Services & Javascript

We're thinking of reworking the genome browser so that Javascript is responsible for the layout of the page at a high level rather than the C scripts on the server. As part of this we'll be moving the C scripts to more of a web-services oriented architecture, where they'll be returning information in JSON rather than in HTML and GIF images. For the near term at least they probably will return GIF images as well. The goal of this rearchitecting is to make it easier to be more interactive, and to take advantage of the good Javascript user-interface (UI) oriented libraries like jQuery.

As is often the case with software development, the demon is in the details. Nonetheless it is helpful to have a clear, simple high level design to start with - to keep at least the messy details in one location of the code from breeding and exponentially multiplying with messy details in other locations....