AJAX Interface: A Breakthrough in Bioinformatics Web Applications

Abstract

Bioinformatics applications are generally multi-server dependants and will have to communicate several information repositories to carry out any analyses. These applications remain computationally intensive and time consuming as they engage lots of data transfer. Hence they face a major bottleneck when ported as web applications. Browser based web applications normally feature the classical request-response approach. If the response becomes late, as it is expected to happen in the case of long running Bioinformatics programs, Apache will get tired and a request timeout error might occur. Alternate approaches like "Client-Pull" models that involve polling strategy with the unpredictable amount of page refreshes, only tend to intensify the network traffi c. Hence a technology that is intelligent enough to support the varied exhaustive Bioinformatics processes becomes highly essential. In this review, we propose how AJAX can afford a laconic framework within the Bioinformatics applications to completely reduce the page refresh nuisance and provide a better user experience.