WeBIAS: a web server for publishing bioinformatics applications

Abstract

Background: One of the requirements for a successful scientific tool is its availability. Developing a functional web service, however, is usually considered a mundane and ungratifying task, and quite often neglected. When publishing bioinformatic applications, such attitude puts additional burden on the reviewers who have to cope with poorly designed interfaces in order to assess quality of presented methods, as well as impairs actual usefulness to the scientific community at large. Results: In this note we present WeBIAS - a simple, self-contained solution to make command-line programs accessible through web forms. It comprises a web portal capable of serving several applications and backend schedulers which carry out computations. The server handles user registration and authentication, stores queries and results, and provides a convenient administrator interface. WeBIAS is implemented in Python and available under GNU Affero General Public License. It has been developed and tested on GNU/Linux compatible platforms covering a vast majority of operational WWW servers. Since it is written in pure Python, it should be easy to deploy also on all other platforms supporting Python (e.g. Windows, Mac OS X). Documentation and source code, as well as a demonstration site are available at http://bioinfo.imdik.pan.pl/webias. Conclusions: WeBIAS has been designed specifically with ease of installation and deployment of services in mind. Setting up a simple application requires minimal effort, yet it is possible to create visually appealing, feature-rich interfaces for query submission and presentation of results.