W2H: WWW interface to the GCG sequence analysis package

Abstract

Motivation: The user-friendly, graphical X-windows interface (WPI) to the GCG sequence analysis package can often not be used due to the lack of an X-server on PC or Macintosh computers. Because Web browsers like Netscape are much more common on those platforms, we decided to develop W2H, a WWW interface to the GCG Sequence Analysis Software Package with nearly the same functionality as the X-windows interface WPI. Results: The new WWW interface (W2H) to the GCG Sequence Analysis Software Package (Wisconsin Package) supports modern Web technologies, like client-pull method, or embedded scripting language, and provides a reasonable platform independence. The interface is quite comprehensive with advanced features like sequence selector, search set builder, enzyme chooser, access to sequence databases, uploading client files to the GCG server or displaying and manipulating graphical outputs in addition to GCG analysis programs. W2H also manages secure access to both GCG server and user data. For special environments, like workshops, conferences and company intranets, there is a special mode (Intranet mode) with less security constraints. The behaviour of W2H is mostly controlled by meta-datafiles describing the applications and giving a base for dynamic creation of HTML documents. This paper presents mainly the development approaches used, and architectural design aspects of W2H. Availability: W2H is available by ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/software/unix/w2h or ftp://genome.dkfz-heidelberg.de/pub/w2h. Contact: m.senger@@@ebi.ac.uk.