[Gmod-tripal] Tripal & Python

[Stephen F. <spf...@gm...>]

Hi All,

In our recent Tripal User's meeting we spoke about several issues 
related to longevity and flexibility of Tripal.  One of the decisions 
from this meeting was to work towards separation of components of Tripal 
that are not specific to Drupal so that others who would prefer to not 
use Drupal can take advantage of the infrastructure that Tripal 
provides.   These non-Drupal components (such as Chado installers, data 
loaders, entities and fields) will form a new Tripal library which can 
be used by the Tripal Drupal module or by others who decide not to use 
Drupal.

One suggestion that was put forth was to perform a feasibility study to 
see if a Python implementation of this new Tripal library could work.  
Python was selected because if of its broad use in informatics and data 
analytics.  To be clear, this does not mean that Tripal will be 
abandoning Drupal or PHP.  If the feasibility study demonstrates 
difficulty integrating with Drupal or not-enough interest from our 
community then we will explore a PHP-based Tripal core library instead.

We are reaching out to the community to solicit volunteers to help with 
this initial feasibility project.  We'd like to have a kick off meeting 
for the Python implementation in the next few weeks. If you are 
interested in participating can you please send me an email as well as 
your time zone so we can coordinate a meeting time.

Thanks!
Stephen