Provide an API

[jonblack]

When a HOPE user creates a report for a relatively new PDB id mrs is used to search for the pdbfinder2 entry created for that PDB id; however, because the PDB id is relatively new, the pdbfinder2 entry hasn't yet been created, which causes MRS to fail with the following error:

Entry 5kxi does not exist in databank pdbfinder2

This ultimately causes HOPE to fail. I created the issue cmbi/mrs#44 in mrs; however, there isn't much that MRS can do about it because the databanks scripts don't provide an API: files are created regularly using cron jobs, but MRS cannot ask for a missing file to be created on-the-fly.

BASH scripts are very limited, so providing an API will require a rewrite of much of the code. https://github.com/cmbi/databanks2 is an improvement on the BASH scripts, but also suffer from the same problem. Ideally the databanks service needs to be written in a language with better support for API development.