[Bioperl-l] BioInformatics toolbox.

[autopost]

All,

Thanks for responding to my question about open source projects working 
towards creating tools/applications.

I'm all for keeping an open philosophy.  BioJava, BioPerl, The Apache 
projects, SourceForge.net, all great places that help accelerate the 
development process so we can get the results we need.

It occurs to me that there may be more users than there are 
programmers.  So, I'm looking to find out if there is a suite of tools that 
are "ready out of the box" and don't require writing scripts,...  I don't 
think such a thing exists (correct me if I'm wrong).  So, I'm looking to 
find people interested in creating such a project.  Or, learn more about 
what some of the commonalities are among the tasks people are trying to do.

When I think of tools, I don't mean scripts - rather something that is GUI 
based that can be run and is intuitive.  Scripts usually aren't 
intuitive.  When I hear scripts, I think of many scripts that have to be 
run one after that other.  Even this is something that would be good in a 
gui - something to manage the repetitive tasks.

As I said, I'm all for the open philosophy.  I just think that having a 
workbench/toolbox that works out of the box is what's missing.  A 
Scientist's, BioInformatician's, or Research Assistant's time would be 
better spent doing research rather than doing (or learning) programming, or 
learning an API/SDK.

If an open-source toolbox (gui based, not script) existed, perhaps those 
doing research could focus more of their efforts on research, rather than 
writing scripts around BioPerl, BioJava.

HOWEVER, I believe whatever gui tools/workbench is created, BioPerl and 
BioJava are excellent SDK's/libraries to use as the building blocks.

Thoughts?   If anyone wants to contact me directly, I welcome that.  I'm 
more than interested to hear what people are trying to do with these 
libraries, what they want to automate, how they want things automated.....

m.