[GSoC] Biocaml GSoC project

[Ashish Agarwal]

I posted [1] a Biocaml project and have announced it to the relevant OCaml
lists. See the link for the latest version, but I'm copying it here too:

Project: Bioinformatics Js_of_ocaml Visualization Toolkit

Rationale: OCaml is a strong statically typed functional programming
language. Usually one does not consider such languages for front-end
development, but the Js_of_ocaml compiler is causing OCaml to be more
widely used for building websites. Js_of_ocaml compiles OCaml code to pure
Javascript and the generated Javascript has very good performance. On the
other hand, bioinformatics data analysis needs to be conducted by a broader
range of users, which requires more elegant user interfaces with high
quality data visualization.

Approach: Write an OCaml library that can be used to visualize large data
sets efficiently and interactively in the browser. The library should be
smart enough to work on the client side when possible, but make server side
calls when necessary. You may want to use Eliom for this purpose. You can
connect to parsers and data structures available in Biocaml as needed. As
demonstration of success, it should be possible to create genome
visualizations like that of the UCSC genome browser and protein interaction
networks like that of Cytoscape.

Difficulty and needed skills: This project is for intermediate to advanced
programmers. You will need to be already familiar with OCaml (or closely
related languages like F# and Haskell) and have a basic understanding of
Javascript and client/server programming.


[1] http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2014_Ideas#Biocaml