[BioSQL-l] Web front-ends to BioSQL

[Chris Fields]

On Jan 30, 2009, at 9:23 AM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

> Having such a webapp would be pretty cool, and I agree with the  
> argument below that there are numerous small groups or individuals  
> with this need. (we have some ourselves here ...)
>
> One word of caution as to where to look for lessons I think is the  
> infamous GMOD gene page and standard web front-end, which has been  
> labored on in various incarnations for more than half a decade,  
> without producing a compelling and broadly adopted result. People's  
> needs and technology obsessions vary from place to place.
>
> One possibly hugely complicating factor for the GMOD web front-end  
> was that the target audience were model organism websites, which  
> themselves have a large and diverse stakeholder community, so  
> flexibility and configurability became overriding requirements  
> resulting in bloat of code stacks and features.
>
> My personal take is that for this to be broadly useful, the primary  
> target audience should probably be programmers, or programming-savvy  
> scientists, who can extend and customize a core application at will.  
> In other words, much in line with the philosophy behind the Bio*  
> libraries.
>
> Other than that, keep it simple so I don't have to learn yet another  
> (namely your templating or clever XML configuration scheme) language  
> to extend it. I sat next to Mark when he generated a bare-bones  
> BioSQL-binding in EJB literally in minutes, which I thought was  
> cool. People rave about Ruby and RoR too as for ease of getting  
> started. By far the most people out there will be familiar with  
> Perl, but I'm not sure what the web application framework would be  
> there that would put me at ease. In the end what may count more than  
> anything else is critical mass even if it's not everyone's darling  
> language.

Perl web application framework: Catalyst and Jifty (have not tried  
them myself).  RoR gets a lot of press, but I understand the RoR devs  
tend not to listen to the core ruby devs and (as a consequence) had  
recently run into issues with the 1.8.7 ruby release, detailed by the  
always-entertaining chromatic here:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/37125

chris

> My $0.02, and I'd be keen so see what comes out of this. If there's  
> something I can do to tip the balance towards something tangible  
> happening, let me know.
>
> 	-hilmar