[BioPython] BioPythonGUI: Graphical User Interface for BioPython

[Peter Cock]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Wubin Qu <quwubin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I started a new project named BioPythonGUI for a few of days.

Hello Wubin Qu,

> BioPythonGUI is a Graphical User Interface of BioPython.

I'm uncomfortable about the name BioPythonGUI, as this to me implies
it is part of Biopython (whereas is it currently just a third party
project built on top of Biopython).  What do other people think?

> However, it's not everyone can use the BioPython, especially ones who do not
> know much about the programming. How can you expect a professor who never
> known about any programming to use BioPython to parse the BLAST report file?
> This is the problem which the BioPythonGUI would solve. I started the
> project with the goal "Everyone can use BioPython with BioPythonGUI".

I don't really understand your goal.  How would a non-programming
professor use your program to parse a BLAST report file?  The NCBI
already try and make the HTML and plain text output useful to
non-programmers and from looking at the screenshots I don't see how
your tool would help.

> Until now, there are two modules SeqGUI and BlastGUI are available in
> BioPythonGUI. I would greatly appreciate if you use BioPythonGUI and send me
> the feedback.

I see your module SeqGUI builds on the SeqGui.py in BioPython (in the
scripts directory).  It might make sense to include your improvements
to this code as part of Biopython.  I haven't looked at your code yet,
so I don't know how much you've changed things.

It is nice to be able to be able to translate, transcribe, reverse
complement etc in a GUI, but personally I don't see the point or
writing a little application just for this.  Also, there are probably
many many existing tools out there that already offer this
functionality.  However, I am happy writing code, so I am not in your
target audience.

Regarding your BlastGUI idea, I can see that a GUI for standalone
blast is nicer than the command line for some people.  However, I
don't see how this is more useful than running a local blast web
server (something the NCBI already provides).

Sorry for being so negative,

Peter