[Biojava-l] Das client

[Matthew Pocock]

Dear everyone,

I have been playing with the dazzle server and trying to build a useable
gui. I haven't yet pointed it at GadFly. The results of an afternoon of
hacking can be found at:

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/~mrp/das-demos.jar

If you grab this and then unjar, you should get a directory called
das-demos (netscape users must right-click and choose save-as, or you
will get error messages). In there are some classes, jar files and
SequenceDemo.html which contains a couple of applets. The applets run
for me on jdk1.3, applet viewer and also Mozilla (yesterday's build). It
totaly fails under ie5 - ms seems to have perpousfuly scuppered 1.2
compatibility, despite releasing a new "Microsoft VM" last week or so
(mustn't rant) - roll on pluggable VMs for ie.

The top applet has a text-field into which you can put a DAS server url
(e.g. http://localhost:8080/das if you are running the dazzle server
localy). You can type in as many URLs as you like. Each reference server
appears as it's own tabbed panel. The panel has a list of annotation
servers to the left (which you can select) and a list of sequences to
the right. Selecting a sequence will send it to the sequence viewer
applet below.

The sequence viewer applet is very rudimentary, but basicaly has a zoom
control at the top, and wraps the sequence and features within a pannel.
If you get keen, you can fiddle about with the SequenceRenderer
instances in the source code to add/remove lines of info (e.g. remove
the repeat line, or make the feature line 'bumped').

This is a proof-of-concept app, so although I'd be interested to hear if
it works, don't go taking out venture-capital on the basis of it.

BioJava people may be interested in looking inside this as an example
BioJava application (nothing if not prompt). After XMAS I will check it
in as a BioJava module.

Have fun.

Matthew