[BioRuby] Announcing Bio-Affy

[Pjotr Prins]

Rubyistas, 

I just released bio-affy, which is a Affymetrix microarray file format
parser (CEL/CDF) for Ruby. The plugin uses both Ruby and C.

This Biogem is an FFI binding to R/Bioconductor's Affyio package:

  http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/2.2/bioc/html/affyio.html

What is interesting about this Biogem/BioRuby plugin is not only that
it uses FFI to map C code to Ruby, but also fires up the R interpreter
to support the Affyio internal function calls into Rlib.

The FFI binding also accesses internal C structs of my Affyio adapter.
See the examples in 

  https://github.com/pjotrp/bioruby-affy/blob/master/spec/bio-affy_spec.rb

Pj.

PS. We will create Biogem scaffolding for FFI support in the near
future, as well as for SWIG and native Ruby extensions. FFI is
interesting as it has good support across all Ruby versions
(including JRuby).