Abstract
BackgroundOne of the requirements for a successful scientific tool is its availability. Developing a functional web service, however, is usually considered a mundane and ungratifying task, and quite often neglected. When publishing bioinformatic applications, such attitude puts additional burden on the reviewers who have to cope with poorly designed interfaces in order to assess quality of presented methods, as well as impairs actual usefulness to the scientific community at large.ResultsIn this note we present WeBIAS—a simple, self-contained solution to make command-line programs accessible through web forms. It comprises a web portal capable of serving several applications and backend schedulers which carry out computations. The server handles user registration and authentication, stores queries and results, and provides a convenient administrator interface. WeBIAS is implemented in Python and available under GNU Affero General Public License. It has been developed and tested on GNU/Linux compatible platforms covering a vast majority of operational WWW servers. Since it is written in pure Python, it should be easy to deploy also on all other platforms supporting Python (e.g. Windows, Mac OS X). Documentation and source code, as well as a demonstration site are available at http://bioinfo.imdik.pan.pl/webias.ConclusionsWeBIAS has been designed specifically with ease of installation and deployment of services in mind. Setting up a simple application requires minimal effort, yet it is possible to create visually appealing, feature-rich interfaces for query submission and presentation of results.
Highlights
One of the requirements for a successful scientific tool is its availability
The GMOD (Generic Model Organism Database) project has developed a framework based on the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) [5]
All data is stored in the relational Structured Query Language (SQL) database which is accessed using SQLAlchemy object-relational mapping framework [8]
Summary
One of the requirements for a successful scientific tool is its availability. Developing a functional web service, is usually considered a mundane and ungratifying task, and quite often neglected. There exist excellent Web Services frameworks like Soaplab [1] or Opal Toolkit [2], which were designed to provide a machine access to services via protocols like WSDL, they require significant installation effort and expert knowledge, and are most useful in case of popular, high-demand applications. They are, less attractive when taking into account user experience, lacking. It is well suited for developing services requiring an efficient database backend, but it has several dependencies which make its installation and setup difficult
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