BIND and SOAP

I'm in the process of developing an application that utilizes information from protein-protein interaction databases. One specific database I am working with is BIND, the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database. As my application will be looking at a large number of genes I had to figure out how to write an application that interacted with the database.

The solution I found was BIND SOAP, an API designed to help developers interface with BIND using either C, Perl, Java, or VB .NET. SOAP or the Simple Object Access Protocol provides a basic messaging framework which allows for communication between applications across the interenet.

After some research I decided that Perl was the best way to go as there was already a Perl module available for use with SOAP, conveninetly named SOAP::Lite. If you have the CPAN module installed on your system the best way to get the SOAP::Lite module on Linux systems is to start the CPAN shell:

[root]# perl -MCPAN -e shell

Once the shell is started, run:

cpan> install SOAP::Lite

If you are having problems installing the module or installing from another system you can go here [soaplite.com] for additional instructions.