The key factor while selecting the programming environment was user-centered design paradigm. After thorough
reconaissance technologies of choice became
- Java 5.0 Standard Edition platform for:
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portability - a unique Java Web Start technology allows to launch
fully-fledged Java application with a single click in the web browser;
graphical user interface was bulid upon the platform-independent Swing widget set,
-
networking - enabling direct connection to the archives of the RCSB
Protein Data Bank (and on-the-fly decompression),
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generic programming - especially useful when hierarchical structural
relations in biopolymers were to be modeled,
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Java2D - to render high quality diagrams,
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JavaDoc - that generates excellent documentation, particularly useful
as project development was spanned over months.
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OpenGL 1.5 for efficient and interactive 3D rendering of molecules
throught the JOGL - a set of Java reference bindings for OpenGL API.
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Poseidon for UML CE 3.1 for preparing draft project and generate initial source code,
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NetBeans IDE 4.1 with Apache Ant and CVS for project automation and general management.
VeaR does not use any third-part bioinformatics libraries. Project was developed under Debian GNU/Linux,
but is tested also for Sun JRE 5.0 on Ms Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X 10.4 and OpenSolaris 1.
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