A Multi-protocol Bioinformatics Web Service: Use SOAP, Take a REST or Go with HTML

Web services are fundamental building blocks for Service Oriented Architectures and Grid computing that are applied in many scientific domains such as bioinformatics. We have designed and implemented a multi-protocol and multifunctional Web service that supports today´s most important industry standards. We show an actual implementation of a bioinformatics database application: HitKeeper, that is now enhanced by programmable Web services interfaces as well as HTML-form based Web access. In this way, a wide range of biologists and bioinformaticians are addressed. We also satisfy an important recent requirement in the e-science community.