[BioRuby] Bio-Incanter

[Francesco Strozzi]

Hi guys,
after having played for a while with Clojure and Incanter
(http://www.incanter.org/), we thought it was nice to have a Ruby gem
to access such a great library, so I would like to point out a new
BioGem called Bio-Incanter https://github.com/cerbero/bioruby-incanter
.
This gem was started by Matteo Picciolini, a bioinformatician working
in my group here in Italy. He's at the first contribution in the
BioRuby world, so be nice!

The gem it's a JRuby wrapper around the Incanter library to provide
nice and powerful functions to create plots and graphs for numerical
and statistical analyses.
Look at the specs to see what methods are available, but basically all
the common plotting functions are covered, including image export in
PNG, JPG or PDF format. There is also a "view" method that can let you
open the graphs in real time and see what you are plotting, a nice
function for scripts or IRB sessions.
Even if you don't know Clojure that's not a problem, the gem takes
care of everything and includes a ready to use Jar with both Clojure
and Incanter.

I think this kind of gems show how JRuby can facilitate the life of a
bioinformatician, using existing solutions that just work and
providing the best out of (Bio)Ruby and the JVM.

-- 

Francesco