>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Tom> A research group here at UNCW is starting a couple of Tom> bioinformatics projects in Java. I said, "look here, there's Tom> this open-source group on the web that's created a huge amount Tom> of code already, let's use it!" Tom> The responses I've gotten have been on the order of "Eww, 600+ Tom> classes. I can write my own parser faster than I can figure out Tom> what they're doing." and "We don't need data models anywhere Tom> near that complex." So why should we use BioJava? The Tom> "overview" on the web page hasn't convinced anybody here. Tom> (Caveats: right now we're a bunch of computer people and a Tom> bunch of biologists, with nobody really cross-trained; I Tom> understand that some day the biologists may start asking Tom> questions that require a nested-feature view of the world, but Tom> haven't convinced the other computer people to plan for that Tom> day yet, and the biologists can't think of any right now.) Sit some of your more sane biologists down in a room, with some of your more sane computer people. Work out what questions you want to address computationally. Make sure the computer people bully the biology people till they have straight answers about exactly what it is they want to do. Then have the computer people work out what they will need to code to do it. From that work out whether you need biojava or not. Personally I have found that once you start to pick a large library apart then its easier to understand than you think its going to be, so I would not let that be a metric. But knowing what you are going to do is vital. Phil _______________________________________________ Biojava-l mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://biojava.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-l
