Todd Harris (

harris@cshl.edu)

Website Overview

Website Milestones20 releases (3 frozen)

User Survey (670 respondents)

Community, outreach, coordination

4 new genomes

Website redesign

40%of users aregrads

54%

Daily (54%)Weekly (35%)

Montly (6%)

Yearly(4%)

use WormBasedaily

U.S.A.Canada

U.K. Japan

GermanyChina

France South Korea Switzerland

The Netherlands

55.2%7.3%4.5%5.3%5.3%3.6%2.1%1.3%2.0%1.2%

Usage: Page Views

187 scripts - ~280K lines of code

103 classes - unique displays for most

Displays, searches, analysis

Scope

Discussion (forums)

SOPs & FAQs (Wiki)

Community & Outreach

Staying Up-To-DateMailing lists

RSS

Staying Up-To-Datetwitter.com/wormbase

Project CoordinationBasecamp (37signals.com)

The Road Ahead: A modern web application

sophisticated caching & load balancing

failover

horizontal scaling

virtualization

24/7/365 uptime

hardware platformwhat we have

Barnacles Square wheels Knots

software platformwhat we have

Barnacles

•monolithic CGIs (Perl)

•fast development, few strictures

•many coders, many styles

•many hacks == many bugs

Lots of maintenance

software platformwhat we have

Square Wheels

•rolled our own

•insufficient tests

•introduces instability

Slows us down

software platformwhat we have

Knots

intermixed logic: application business display

Difficult to unplug just one

software platformwhat we have

Doesn’t scale: performance or team

Barnacles Square wheels Knots

software platformwhat we have

Strategy1. Use a web framework

2. Employ deliberate design

3. Convert site & maintain current structure

• Hard tasks easy, easy tasks automatic

• Enforce structure & coding style

• Flexible and maintainable

• Extend resources

• Due diligence: RoR, CGI::Application, Catalyst

1. Use a web framework

Catalyst (catalyst.perl.org)

•Open source

•Model - View - Controller separation

•Active community

•Perl - can reuse good parts

The Catalyst Framework

2. Deliberate design (I)

Generic: database & species

Web 2.0 Influences

User-configurable and interactive

Community knowledge: tagging and trends

API: mining & integration (REST interface)

Multiple Formats: HTML, PDF, XML, JSON

Deliberate design (II)

Borrow from

Information Architecture,

Usability,

Graphic Design.

Include extensive tests

Open platform: core, plugins.

Increase: usability, readability, absorbability

The current siteis page-based

Keep this

Discard this

Sections = Widgets

functional unit: content not page

get some REST!

A Gene Report: /gene/unc-2/report

All alleles: /gene/unc-2/alleles...as PDF: /gene/unc-2/report/pdf

75%convertedcurrent refactored

lines

3. conversion progress

Scraping The Hull

current refactored

5xfewerbarnacles

Cleaner, simpler code

lines

4. Roadmap

current

2.0 (classic)

2.0 (new)

Select pages, old look, new structure

Begin demonew UI

Full site innew structure;phase out old

Release new UI