Spin update

[James Bonfield]

The EMBOSS interface in Spin is coming along well. My parser processes all 156
ACD files (including the collection of test and demo ones) in the 1.9.1
distribution and produces tcl code (using [incr widgets]) for each
dialogue. All the tcl code runs and produces dialogue, but I expect many of
them fail when I press the OK button. I'm working through them
slowly. Technology wise, I think I've implemented pretty much most of the hard
stuff now, with expressions in default, information, min, max, required and
needed all working. Quite a bit of checking is performed (sequence types,
min/max ranges, etc), but I've still got more work to do there (eg maximum
number of values within lists).

I'm using our existing code (that Kathryn Beal wrote) for drawing the
graphical output from EMBOSS. However there seems to be little consistency in
the arguments here. Many programs take a -graph option which can have the type 
"data". Others take a -data argument which saves the graphical information in
another format. It would be good if these could be merged together somehow -
all using the same method. I recall Kathryn discussing this with Alan before,
but I don't know what the outcome was. Could you (Alan) please remind me what
the conclusion was?

One other obvious thing that strikes me is that we need a big reorganisation
of the appl: group field. I'm using these to generate menus and cascading
submenus, but it's almost impossible to guess where things we be. I'll perhaps
have a go at reorganising it once I've finished the completed acd2tcl itself.

James

-- 
James Bonfield (jkb at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk)   Tel: 01223 402499   Fax: 01223 213556
Medical Research Council - Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, England.
Also see Staden Package WWW site at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/