[BiO BB] BioInformatics Workbench project
Marcel van den Bosch
marcel at bioinformatics.org
Sun Jun 25 15:02:05 EDT 2006
Hello Jeff, Hello Oscar,
I must agree with you that this project has a very broad scope. However
part of the project should be to determine what (popular) functionalities a
complete workbench should contain and with this information, compose a
list of functional requirements.
These functional requirements should provide us with enough information to
begin working on the technical details. Perhaps if it turns out that all
requirements are related to proteomics-area, we can always call it
something like the "All-in-one Proteomics Workbench project.." :-)
But I think that we shouldn't be doing that until we know the exact
requirements and who would like to team-up with the project.
The differences between this application and other workbench projects, in
my opinion, should be:
- Must contain an intuitive user interfaces (taking advantage of standard
UI components from the .NET framework) so that the time needed to learn
how to use the application should be minimized and the application should
be attractive to (biochemistry) students without a lot of
computer/informatics experience.
- Integration and collaboration of different functions/tools within the
workbench. This should allow the user of the application to work more
efficiently than a collection of standalone tools and saves a lot of time
saving/opening/converting filetypes etc. Pretty much the same idea as the
Open Office/Microsoft Office suite.. it just works better then using all
standalone applications for example like Wordperfect, Lotus 123 and dBASE.
- It allows developers from widely used languages as C++/C#/J#/Visual
Basic and Fortran to work on the project or allows them to easily develop
a plug-in for it.
Ofcourse I am open to suggestions, I received a lot of useful tips by
email from interested people. So I of you have some suggestions which
might help bringing this idea to life, please let me know. I am also
interested in using a agile style system development methodology, so that
this project obtains some flexibility in it.s requirements later in the
process.
This project is too big to do it on my own, so any help is appreciated.
The first step should be, in my opinion, to ask people what they would
like to have in a workbench. From that point on we can always decide
to change things according to the needs.
Regards,
Marcel
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