JABAWS MANUAL

About

What is JABAWS?

JABAWS stands for JAva Bioinformatics Analysis Web Services. It is a collection of web services for multiple sequence alignment. For simplicity we referrer to them as JABAWS. Right now, JABAWS makes it easy to access well-known multiple sequence alignment programs from JalView. However, the scope of JABAWS is not limited to multiple sequence alignment programs. Future versions of JABAWS will incorporate protein disorder prediction, BLAST, PSIBLAST and HMMER database searches and many other tools. For the list of currently supported programs see here. JABAWS consists of the two parts - the server and the client. Unlike other web services you can download and use both on your own computer! If you want a server just for yourself, then download and install JABAWS Virtual Appliance. It requires no configuration and simple to install. If you want to install JABAWS for your own lab then download JABAWS Web Application aRchive. It is slightly more complicated to configure but is very straightforward too. Finally, if you want to script against any version of JABAWS or interested in writing your own client, the JABAWS command line client is what you need.

JABAWS Benefits

JABAWS can be deployed on many operating system and operate as a stand alone server or submit the jobs to the cluster. Thanks to DRMAA it integrates well with a large variety of cluster job management systems. Jalview from version 2.6 integrates with JABAWS and can be configured to submit jobs to different versions of JABAWS, for example to your local, lab version, or publicly available version elsewhere. As JABAWS can be installed in your lab, or indeed on your personal computer, it eliminates the need to send your private information to the outside, to one of the publicly accessible servers. JABAWS can run programs with additional parameters defined by you, so you are no longer limited to defaults. JABAWS is safe to install for public access as it could limit the size of the tasks which it accepts and denies access to resources within web application folder.

JABA Web Services Programs

JABAWS currently uses the following programs under the hood

What is JABAWS Server?

JABAWS Server is a Web Application which exposes a number of widely used Bioinformatics programs as SOAP web services. Currently it supports 5 multiple sequence alignment programs. You can download and install JABAWS on your own computer. JABAWS can be configured to execute programs on computer it is installed or submit them to the cluster. JABAWS provides the uniform API for each web service if supports.

What is JABAWS client?

JABAWS client is a command line Java application which can call all JABAWS methods on any instance of JABAWS Server, no matter local or remote. It is useful if you want to script against a JABAWS server and do not want to handle any web service specific details. We also offer a source code of the client so that you can find out how to work with JABA Web Services if you would like to write your own client software. JABAWS command line client offers the same functionality as Jalview when connected to JABAWS.

Programmatic access to JABAWS

JABA Web Services are WS-I basic profile compliant, they can be accessed in a standard way as any other web service. The WSDL for each service is published on the JABAWS home page. If you use Java, then you can use our client package to access JABAWS. This package contains value objects which you could alternatively generate with wsimport in Java, or similar tool in other language. On top of that it offers some additional methods which further simplify working with JABAWS. For more information please refer to the data model javadoc.