Galaxy Portal: interacting with the galaxy platform through mobile devices.

Claus Børnich,Eivind Hovig,Martin Čech,Ivar Grytten,Geir Kjetil Sandve,Jonas Paulsen

doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btw042

Abstract

Summary: We present Galaxy Portal app, an open source interface to the Galaxy system through smart phones and tablets. The Galaxy Portal provides convenient and efficient monitoring of job completion, as well as opportunities for inspection of results and execution history. In addition to being useful to the Galaxy community, we believe that the app also exemplifies a useful way of exploiting mobile interfaces for research/high-performance computing resources in general.Availability and implementation: The source is freely available under a GPL license on GitHub, along with user documentation and pre-compiled binaries and instructions for several platforms: https://github.com/Tarostar/QMLGalaxyPortal. It is available for iOS version 7 (and newer) through the Apple App Store, and for Android through Google Play for version 4.1 (API 16) or newer.Contact: geirksa@ifi.uio.no

Highlights

Present-day biomedical research often depends on computeintensive data processing and analysis at different stages of an investigation
The standard web interface of Galaxy can be used through a mobile device, it is not well suited for a small screen and touch-based interface
The Qt framework is C þþ based, but the app was primarily developed by using the Qt Modelling Language (QML), with much of the logic of QML constructs coded in JavaScript

Summary

Introduction

Present-day biomedical research often depends on computeintensive data processing and analysis at different stages of an investigation. Galaxy (Goecks et al, 2010) is a widely used platform for genome analysis, providing a web-based interface to initiate and monitor computations executed on a server. It can, in certain situations, be more convenient to access Galaxy through a mobile device than through a computer for quick inspection of analysis results or to check which underlying tools and parameter settings were used to produce a given result. As biomedical analyses may involve several computational steps, each running for a long and a priori undetermined time period, it may be important to frequently check for job completion so as to know when subsequent steps should be initiated. The standard web interface of Galaxy can be used through a mobile device, it is not well suited for a small screen and touch-based interface

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion