[BioPython] Biopython 0.90d01, biopython-corba 0.1 released

Jeffrey Chang jchang@SMI.Stanford.EDU
Fri, 7 Jul 2000 10:51:21 -0700 (PDT)


Hello everybody,

Biopython 0.90d01 and Biopython-corba 0.1 has just been made available on
the web site at:
http://www.biopython.org/Download/

These are both developer's (pre-alpha) releases.  This means that before
the real 0.90 release, we still need to finish implementing a few
features, stabilize the API, and test & document it.  However, we believe
there's enough code there for people who like to be on the bleeding edge
get some work done.

In this release, we make available (in one form or another):

- a general representation of sequences, capable of handling cases
such as ambiguous bases or gap characters.

- tools for performing operations on sequences, including
transcription, translation, weight calculations.

- a suite of parsers with "SAX-like" interfaces for handling data from
popular services such as BLAST, Fasta, PubMed, Prosite, SCOP,
SwissProt.

- interfaces to popular bioinformatics destinations, such as NCBI,
ExPASy, and SCOP.

- frameworks for regression testing.

- a CORBA interface capable of interacting with bioperl and biojava
objects.

- miscellaneous tools, such as algorithms for Support Vector Machine,
k-Nearest-Neighbors, and Naive Bayes classification.


However, there's still a lot of stuff left to do.  Please take a look at
the code we have, and start sending in bug reports via our web interface
at:
http://www.biopython.org/biopython-bugs/

We'd like to thank all the people who have contributed to this release,
including the core developers, bio* folk, and folks who have sent in
patches.  These types of open source projects wouldn't work otherwise.

Enjoy!

Jeff, speaking for (or maybe not :) Biopython