Server

We can provide three types of access to our service:

• By direct connection through a port.
  A client program requests a connection through a port with our network server. The network server, receives through a simple protocol the name of the blast program to execute, the command line arguments, and the query sequence. It starts the parallel blast application, collects the results, and writes them back to the same port. That required a lot of programming with sockets and unix kernel calls. The server was implemented by the author, the client program, by NCBI.

• By mail.
  Users send a mail in a certain format, which is read by a program. Our mail server parses the message, starts the parallel blast application, collects and writes the results into a mail message, and sends them back. This was implemented by the author.

• Mosaic.
  On a mosaic page, the user can interactively give the query and choose the value of the parameters. The mosaic server, which may be anywhere, calls the network client program which makes a direct connection through a port to the blast program. The results, are displayed on a mosaic page. Kay Hoffmann at ISREC wrote a mosaic page to interface with the network program.