[BiO BB] Plone and bioinformatics?

[Rick Casey]

I am new to this site, so have not had any experience here yet; but wanted to ask this community a question.

I work at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics in Boulder (ibgwww.colorado.edu), where I am constructing an inhouse, web-based database to serve as a central repository for their research data and analysis.

I've been working on this for about two and half years now, using PostGres as the backend database, and PHP for the web interface, with some occasional Perl. Progress has been steady but slow, and I am searching for better software development tools to use on this project.

I would like to ask if anyone here has experience using Plone? It seems to be a leading candidate for the kind of tool I need. Where this project gets bogged down is developing webpages that communicate with the database, and in using a relational schema.

It would seem that an object-oriented schema would be better for the complex data structures required in a genetics laboratory environment. Making schema changes to a relational structure, and then modifying PHP code tied to it, is quite labor intensive. I am hoping that an O-O schema plus using a content management system will help with this; but would like to "look before I leap", so to speak.

So if anyone has experience relevant to this type of development, I would like to hear about it. I would also be willing to share more details about our project, if anyone should be interested.

Best regards,
Rick Casey
rick.casey at colorado.edu
Professional Research Assistant
Institute for Behavioral Genetics
University of Colorado at Boulder