[Biojava-l] BLAST/Java interface

[Schreiber, Mark]

Matthew and Keith,

Might this be a case for encapsulation of some of the common parsing
tasks in a single easy to use object or tools class. Most of the time if
you want to quickly parse a blast output you don't want have to
understand the entire event driven parsing framework. Much like creating
a DNA sequence with DNATools. Most of the ugliness is handled for you
and you don't really need to know whats going on.

Is it possible to have a class that contains an internal Process object
that points to the blast binary(s) (whose path could be passed as a File
reference). This object could then take seach strings as an InputStream
and return results as an OutputStream abstracting away the need to
understand whats happening under the hood.

Just a thought.

- Mark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Pocock [mailto:matthew_pocock@yahoo.co.uk] 
> Sent: Friday, 23 August 2002 9:12 a.m.
> To: nathan whitehouse
> Cc: biojava-l@biojava.org
> Subject: Re: [Biojava-l] BLAST/Java interface
> 
> 
> Hi Nathan,
> 
> The solution depends on wether you want to do the processing of the 
> blast report client or server side. It sounds like you are using 
> servlets. If that's the case, then you can drop biojava.jar in as a 
> dependancy in your servlets .war (in the lib directory?) and use the 
> excelent blast handeling code from CAT. There's a tutorial at 
> http://biojava.org/tutorials/blastlikeParsingCookBook/index.ht
> ml to get 
> you started. You could stream the result to the applet as an XML 
> document and then parse that client-side with a SAX handler, 
> or perhaps 
> send over serialized simple-stupid objects - presumably you have an 
> object model for blast hits in the applet portion already. If the 
> servlet is spitting out static pages, then it's relatively easy to 
> consume the blast XML and emit a well formatted web page, 
> either using 
> your own code or using XSLT.
> 
> If the parsing needs to be done in the client-side applet, then I 
> sudgest you grab the source-code version of biojava (from 
> anonymous CVS 
> - http://cvs.biojava.org/) and try pulling the xml parser package out 
> into its own small jar. It would be bad to send the whole of 
> biojava to 
> the client unless you are using webstart and have a guaranteed good 
> connection to the clients (e.g. not over the web).
> 
> I hope that gives you some ideas. There are other ways to 
> skin this cat, 
> so if none of this hits the spot, post back a slightly more detailed 
> idea of what you are doing and we may be able to give a more focussed 
> answer.
> 
> Good luck,
> Matthew
> 
> ps if you have problems with the blast parser not handeling 
> your version 
> of blast then we can work together to sort this out
> 
> nathan whitehouse wrote:
> > Hello people at BioJava,
> > 
> >   I'm modifying an existing Java applet-servlet used
> > by this lab.
> > 
> >   People want us to add BLAST to this applet.
> >   
> >   Anybody know of a good way to do this?
> > 
> >    Are there convenient BLAST libraries to call from
> > the servlet?  We've talked about calling a C or C++
> > library using the JNI.  I've looked around and it
> > seems that there's no modularized BLAST lying around
> > that would make this easy.  
> >   The simple way to do it is just call BLASTAll from
> > the shell with its arguments.  But this is a hack; I
> > want to know if there is a better way to pass objects
> > in and out of BLAST.
> > 
> >   Thanks!
> >   Nathan
> > 
> >   Nathan Whitehouse
> >   Shaulsky Lab
> >   Baylor College of Medicine
> >   Houston, Texas, USA
> > 
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> 
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