[DAS] Dalliance: a new genome DAS client

[Thomas Down]

One word of warning: I've not done a lot of testing with old web browsers,
so I'd strongly recommend using Firefox 3.6, Safari 4 or 5, or an up-to-date
version of Google Chrome (Chrome auto-updates by default, so I doubt there
are many old versions in the wild).

Internet Explorer support *is* on the way, but isn't quite there yet, and
will probably be limited to Internet Explorer 9 (previous versions don't
have SVG graphics, which we're using extensively).

            Thomas.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Thomas Down <thomas.a.down at gmail.com> wrote:

> As some of you already know, I've been experimenting recently with a
> web-based DAS client for genomic data.  It's still in
> a unashamedly prototypical state (in particular, some of the popups and
> configuration stuff is outright clunky, and we know it!), but we're starting
> to find it quite useful, and would be interested to receive more feedback.
>  So if you're curious, you can try it here:
>
>                http://www.biodalliance.org/human/ncbi36/
>
> It's a fully-fledged DAS/1.53 client (with a few bits of DAS/1.6, and
> hopefully rather more coming soon), but has one major caveat: since it's
> pure Javascript code running in your web browser, there are limitations to
> which servers it can connect to.  Specifically, it will only work with DAS
> servers that implement the W3C cross-origin resource sharing model (which
> has been discussed on this list before, but drop me a line if you've got any
> questions).  What does this mean in practice?  If you're adding datasources
> from the registry, things are simple because Dalliance will only allow you
> to add CORS-enabled sources (a huge thanks to Jonathan Warren for adding
> some support for this in the registry).  If you run your own DAS servers and
> don't list them in the registry, you'll need to check for CORS compatibility
> yourself.  The latest versions of Proserver and Dazzle should both be okay.
>
> All comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome!
>
>                    Thomas Down.
>