The new project I’m working on is a facelift for the TBLASTX results that are displayed on the Phage SEED here at edwardslab. The current one is functional but a little bit hard to read. Also it’s not very easy on the eyes, in my opinion. So I have taken up the charge of giving it a so-called facelift.

The code for the SeedViewer is all .cgi, so I can use web-friendly scripting language I want, I’ve chosen Perl to be consistent with the rest of the SEED’s programming.

I haven’t chosen a graphics library because I’m not sure what I want, and I haven’t done enough research into pros and cons. Or enough research period.

I am becoming skilled in Perl and am coding the framework as I spin my wheels with regards to the graphics.

Current graphics choices are: GD graphics library (simple, easy, on-demand .jpg/.png generation), Flash (popular, high-power, highest quality, interactive), Cairo (Pros/Cons not researched YET).

One big question I have is that the data I need is stored on Octopussy and updated regularly. I’m unsure whether I want to just open a pipe up to Octopussy, read the file, then copy it to a local data structure in memory, or copy the files over regularly via a daemon or script, and just make sure that I’m cleaning up after myself so I don’t blow up the server. There are also probably third or fourth options. If you think of anything, let me know. The first sounds slow and hard on memory, but local storage-efficient. The second requires me to write a daemon or script that then spends a LONG time copying files from one server to another. I’m not sure that’s the best way of doing things.