Playing with BioJS

In the post entitled The Secret of Building a scientific community, Manuel Corpas describe his experiences coordinating the BiosJS project. It is a great writing and if you are interested in Open Source communities, related to research or not, you will find it very interesting.

I learned about BioJS months ago, but never really used it. After reading Manuel’s post I followed some tutorials and was able to produce some neat HTML pages with sequences and trees. A few things that I learned:

• There are several components implemented by contributors
• Components have different dependencies
• Some components can use Java applets
• Some components can be use Ajax to retrieve remote content

Using Jenkins to serve BioJS artifacts

The JQuery Plug-in simply adds JQuery into Jenkins web page, but the same approach won’t work with BioJS since it is framework-agnostic (which is great) and each component may have different dependencies (YUI, JQuery UI, …).

The simplest way to produce artifacts using BioJS in Jenkins, and serve the content from Jenkins is by using CDN’s for retrieving the JS files, and the HTML Publisher plug-in to archive and serve the HTML’s. As in this sample build.

Some components use Ajax requests to dynamically update the UI. For these components a callback would have to be implemented in a plug-in for Jenkins. So the simplest approach is to deploy these artifacts to a Web server with the callback.