[Biophp-dev] BOSC 2003 Brisbane

Greg Tyrelle biophp-dev@bioinformatics.org
Fri, 4 Jul 2003 11:52:32 +1000


*** Serge Gregorio wrote: 
  |>> The only bad thing is that words like 
  |>> BIOPHP [emphasis mine] pop up.
  |>> What happened to Biopython.  Dueling it out 
  |>> PHP versus Python. Whoah, this is really 
  |>> degenerating. I need a better filter on my brain.
  |
  |> ("Dueling it out?"  No more so than Perl vs 
  |> Python....) I'll refrain from commenting on their
  |> grammar...
  |
  |The image that comes to mind by reading the above is that some
  |people engaged in some debate on the merits of using PHP vs Python for
  |bioinformatics.  So what really happened, Greg?  =)

Greetings all, 

I'm finally back in Sydney after 7 gruelling days of science (ISMB +
Tutorials + BOSC) and still recovering...

So what happened at BOSC 2003 ? 

A lot of drinking :)

Seriously, it was a great experience to finally meet a lot of the
open-bio* developers in person and exchange ideas. 

I had the opportunity to introduce BioPHP in a 5 minute lightning
talk. The project generated a fair amount of curiosity from people at
BOSC, mainly because people are interested in using PHP to build
bioinformatics web applications, no great surprise. 

The talks slides are here:

http://www.tyrelle.net/public/2003/BOSC/foilgrp03.html

I did make it clear that Sege and Sean started projects at roughly the
same time and that these are currently being merged. Keep in mind I
prepared these slides the night before, so apologies if there were any
mistakes etc.

Slightly more significant for the project as a whole was talking to
Chris Dagdigian of the open-bio.org foundation. I discussed with him
the possibility of BioPHP being supported by open-bio and the answer
was definitely yes. That means mailing lists, cvs repositories, DNS
and web hosting. He also offered biophp.open-bio.org if we want it ?

Personally I think it sounds like a good offer, what do you all think ?

And finally, that quote above is from Brad Chapman's BOSC blog (Brad
being one of the main biopython developers). It was just stream of
consciousness so I'd take it with a grain of salt :)

In general the response to BioPHP was good, not "Why BioPHP ?" but
"Tell me more"...

_greg

-- 
Greg Tyrelle  (http://www.kinglab.unsw.edu.au/~greg)

"Logic only gives man what he needs, 
 magic gives man what he wants" - Tom Robbins