AJAXification of genome browsers
Euan Adie
Saturday, 24 February 2007 19:51 UTC
Does anybody who’s more in the loop know if the big genome browsers (Ensembl, UCSC) are doing anything about AJAXifying their interfaces?
Mainly this’d be cool so that you don’t have to reload huge pages of features every time you want to shift the viewport a little bit to the left. That definitely puts people off.
There was a bit of interest in this a while back on the blogs (Pierre whipped something up, I think?), GBrowse got started in the Holmes lab and somebody said that Ensembl were looking into something similar.
What’s the latest? Any other ideas about how the browsers could be made easier to use by judicial application of web 2.0 technologies?
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Here is where I think there needs to be a change in philosophy. Institutions like the NCBI/EBI have historically made their own front ends to the tools they develop, and while APIs are available, they are often used by Perl scripts that scrape the databases to capture latest builds, changes, etc. We need to move in a different direction. NCBI/EBI etc become repositories. Let others build on top of them, via AJAX-y browsers/viwers, and other services that use APIs to really provide alternative views into what are rather rich data sources
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Ajax is just: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, so in someway I belive that is not really a NEW technology…
I have developed a database interface for affymetrix data that use some Ajax technologies.
Splicy: http://bio.ifom-ieo-campus.it/splicy
In the splicy web server I made a massive use of the Overlib (http://www.bosrup.com/web/overlib/) javascript library: an easy to use library to generate nice pop-up windows.
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