ialbert
commented
4 months ago Running a publicly facing service is about substantially harder than running the same code locally.
There are always ongoing problems that need to be dealt with, from security issues, to patches, updates, user issues, timeouts, overloads etc. When a server takes outside inputs from anonymous users, these inputs need to be heavily sanitized, both coming in and also the results going out. The web is a very hostile environment and exploits abound, it is a huge responsibility.
It also costs say $20 per month. Again not all that much, but still it means having to pay $20 month from now on.
Finally, in this particular case, the tasks are too easy to abuse, even accidentally. Selecting a genelist of 100 highly annotated genes would take maybe a minute to compute, but during that time it would use substantial amounts of RAM and CPU power, something that I cannot offer to the world.
One of the unique features here is that GeneScape can be installed and run as a standalone package with no command line skill! How many bioinformatics command line programs do that? Not too many right?
So GeneScape is already far ahead of the typical bioinformatics tooling, though I agree that would be awesome if one could just run it with even less effort.
j-andrews7
It feels it'd be straightforward to set up a web server for this, which would improve accessibility and usage greatly. It feels like it'd really be worth the effort if possible.