Webserver Applications And E-Mail Delivery Of Results

Question

[Niallhaslam]

Hi all,

Hope I can form this into an appropriate question, but basically I am looking for answers to the question:

Do you find the ability to receive an e-mail of results from a webserver useful?

An ancillary question is do you selectively not use webservers (when open alternatives are available) that require you to submit an e-mail address to run the results?

We are currently developing a new webserver and the results take in the order of 5-10 minutes to calculate for a given protein sequence. It does not currently have any kind of REST or SOAP type interface (but will have downloadable version for scripting).

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

[Neilfws]

I suspect this is one of those issues where personal preferences are paramount. For what it's worth, here are my thoughts.

First, I don't like disclosing an email address without very good reason. The website would have to provide an excellent service to me, that I could not get any other way.

Second, I've lost count of the number of websites which never delivered a result to my email address - it has made me rather cynical. It only takes one failure and the user will never return.

Third: for me, websites and "waiting" do not go together. I expect results in my browser. My opinion is that for complex operations where the time cannot be reduced below minutes, a web server is not the correct solution: I would rather download an executable and run it locally.

[Jan Kosinski]

I believe that for "complex operations where the time cannot be reduced below minutes" the webserver is actually a perfect solution. Take Haddock docking program. Using the program locally requires lots of software to install, and then enough computational power to get the results. But they provided a web server (http://haddock.science.uu.nl/services/HADDOCK/haddock.php) that has excellent easy to use interface, and distributes your jobs over a grid. Much better solution that local installation.

[Neilfws]

Yes, but how many web servers have a grid or HPC solution at the backend? Answer: very few. Most bioinformatics web servers are single machines with no consideration of scalability.

Answer 2

[Jan Kosinski]

I find it very useful and I vote for optional e-mail with a link with a result.

Just don't forget to include customizable job name in the e-mail title! - it's often overlooked.

Answer 3

[hadasa]

I prefer if the server offers a download option rather than send the results by email. Most often, the emailed results are a pain to parse unless they are delivered through a standard format (csv,GFF etc). Unless otherwise, I also don't find it very useful to send analysis plots via email. Provide Raw data in an appropriate format for easy parsing to a package like R or others.

Answer 4

[Jeremy Leipzig]

I would rather the site just hang and display a progress bar, even for five minutes. The email thing is understandable from a development standpoint but akin to saying "yeah, let me get back to you". I just don't think people are expecting to meet a new pen pal when they use a web app.

Prior to AJAX it was nearly impossible to properly implement a progress bar but there are a lot of solutions now, jQuery being the arguably most popular: http://www.ultramegatech.com/blog/2010/10/create-an-upload-progress-bar-with-php-and-jquery/

Answer 5

[pmenzel]

I like the e-mail option. It's nice to get a reminder that I submitted something. However it's usually easier and more convenient when the e-mail just contains a link to the results on the webserver rather than the actual results.

Answer 6

[Leszek]

I'm as well for email option. In my opinion, often the user just want to test given resource and it's not feasible to download/compile to perform several jobs. Moreover, for me email is more handy, than keeping the website opened, especially in cases where it's difficult to predict how long the jobs is going to run for (often it depends on server load and queue and this is difficult to estimate!).

Answer 7

[Mary]

I think it's nice of you to ask users.

For 5-10 minutes I probably wouldn't expect use a mailing option. But I definitely have used them for longer jobs and I don't mind. I also understand if a site wants to manage the jobs, and if I'm using it for free, they can take their time.

If it is an option, that's great. If it's required...it would depend on how much I need the analysis. And I might be reluctant to try at first.