Worm Breeder's Gazette 14(4): 15 (October 1, 1996)
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
| 1 | CRBM CNRS, Montpellier, France, mieg@kaa.crbm.cnrs-mop.fr |
| 2 | Whitehead Institute/MIT, Boston, USA, lstein@genome.wi.mit.edu |
As more and more data is being collected on the worm, and this increase will hopefully keep growing, we thought it might be nice for people to be able to access all the information stored in acedb or in other servers from their PC or Mac or Unix station through the network, without having to import the new releases and the entire database at their own site. A major breakthrough came in this year, with the advent of the Java language, which guarantees portability of the displays on any platform on which a small Java interpreter is loaded. In practice, you need Netscape 2.0 or above. In this vein, we started the development of Jade, a communication layer, connecting a collection of independent displays written in Java to a central browser and to a collection of database servers. With some work on our side, the users could expect several kinds of benefits: - gain in disk space and guarantee to work on the latest set of data - transparent selection of the computer type, including small cheap ones - choice of the display, among a growing variety of "reusable" displays, written in Java by people eventually outside of the acedb community. If you have seen or written such displays, please tell us, we will try to connect them. - capability to get data transparently from multiple servers, where the data can be maintained by different people, either in acedb-like object oriented databases or even in relational databases or from simple files. This has presently been tested only for cereals databases, but could be set up for the worm as well, thereby partitioning the data collation work. A prototype of Jade, presently showing only a simplified view of acedb with only a few displays, can be browsed through Netscape at http://alpha.crbm.cnrs-mop.fr/jade/jade.html. Another server at http://genome.wustl.edu, maintained by Ladeana Hillier, will soon show the exact state of the Saint Louis sequencing effort. In the long term, it should be possible, by connecting to a single site, to get an integrated view of many such specialized databases, displayed in your preferred view. We will develop it further if you demonstrate some interest, so please comment!