[Gmod-ajax] AJAX GBrowse poster feedback from RECOMB

[Andrew U. <and...@gm...>]

Hi everyone...

Mitch and I presented a poster on AJAX GBrowse yesterday at RECOMB,
and it was well received.  Y'all can see the poster itself here:

http://biowiki.org/twiki/pub/GBrowse/SkinnerUzilovMungallHolmesRecomb2007Poster/RECOMB2007posterSkinnerUzilovMungallSteinHolmes.pdf

I just wanted to get some poster session impressions out of my head
before I forget them... this is by no means a complete summary of what
was mentioned... Mitch, you should add anything I'm missing:

- We had a laptop set up running the demo... original GBrowse and AJAX
GBrowse side-to-side to demonstrate.  This was a good idea.

- This is not the first time someone is making an AJAX or JavaScript
genome browser, but ours is further along and more reusable than the
other attempts.  As a matter of fact, there seems to be a tendency for
people to homebrew their own browsers for specific purposes in
less-than-reusable fashion.  A certain Bay Area company (should I
mention who?  I don't know what the etiquette rules are...) actually
went as far as to reverse engineer the obfuscated JavaScript of Google
Maps to make a spiffy custom browser (they never heard of the
"Pragmatic Ajax" book)... then they invited us to demo our version for
them sometime.  I think I convinced some people to at least use
GBrowse instead of homebrewing their own throwaway implementation.

- A lot of people asked "can I do this or that track" or "this or that
species"... it appears people have an impression that genome browsers
are very restricted to the underlying data; they're used to them being
purpose-specific.  I tried to dispell this notion.

- I also got some questions about file formats and database schemas.
In general, it seems that it wasn't obvious that this is a generic
browser useful for ANY feature data.

- I got quite a few questions about why we're not using Java applets
or SVG or Flash... one guy was particularly adamant in favor of Java
applets (a few people seemed to think they were a bad idea), but I
realized I can't really come up with a convincing reason AGAINST Java.
 SVG implementation is currently shaky, something which people at the
session mentioned, and we simply don't know Flash, but that can be
learned if there's a good reason for it.  But why not Java applets?
The only two reasons we came up with are (1) long load time, and (2)
need to install Java, but that's not hard...

- I got a couple of questions about whether our approach will scale.
One gentleman did point out that storage requirements for e.g. a human
genome would be ridiculous, even if we get rid of storing feature info
in HTML.  Related to this, I got many questions/suggestions that we
should shift layout/rendering to the client side completely.  There
were quite a few people in favor of that idea and seem to think even
JavaScript can do what we need.

Anyway... there's other stuff I'm forgetting, but this is it for now.


Andrew