Developing a modern web interface for database-driven bioinformatics tools [Engineering in Genomics]

Bioinformatics tools are designed to help researchers sift through vast amounts of data and identify previously unseen relationships. Unfortunately, the limited sophistication of many of these tools can make this process a struggle to manage an extensive search that branches into multiple sets of results. Bioinformatics tools implemented as rich internet applications (RIA) will have behavior similar to desktop applications using familiar interface paradigms such as drag-and-drop, context menus, and tabs, and should therefore be simpler for researchers to learn and use. While the focus on the emergence of RIAs has been on mainstream commercial projects with wide use, bioinformatics has much to gain from the adoption of these programming techniques