ESEI-Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad de Vigo, Ourense, Spain.
CINBIO-Centro de Investigaciones Biomédicas, Universidad de Vigo, Vigo, Spain.
PLoS One. 2018 Sep 20;13(9):e0204474. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204474. eCollection 2018.
Modern bioinformatics and computational biology are fields of study driven by the availability of effective software required for conducting appropriate research tasks. Apart from providing reliable and fast implementations of different data analysis algorithms, these software applications should also be clear and easy to use through proper user interfaces, providing appropriate data management and visualization capabilities. In this regard, the user experience obtained by interacting with these applications via their Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) is a key factor for their final success and real utility for researchers. Despite the existence of different packages and applications focused on advanced data visualization, there is a lack of specific libraries providing pertinent GUI components able to help scientific bioinformatics software developers. To that end, this paper introduces GC4S, a bioinformatics-oriented collection of high-level, extensible, and reusable Java GUI elements specifically designed to speed up bioinformatics software development. Within GC4S, developers of new applications can focus on the specific GUI requirements of their projects, relying on GC4S for generalities and abstractions. GC4S is free software distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General Public License and both source code and documentation are publicly available at http://www.sing-group.org/gc4s.
现代生物信息学和计算生物学是由进行适当研究任务所需的有效软件可用性驱动的研究领域。除了提供不同数据分析算法的可靠和快速实现外，这些软件应用程序还应通过适当的用户界面清晰易用，提供适当的数据管理和可视化功能。在这方面，通过其图形用户界面 (GUI) 与这些应用程序交互获得的用户体验是其最终成功和对研究人员实际效用的关键因素。尽管存在专注于高级数据可视化的不同软件包和应用程序，但缺乏提供相关 GUI 组件的特定库来帮助科学生物信息学软件开发人员。为此，本文介绍了 GC4S，这是一个面向生物信息学的高级、可扩展和可重用的 Java GUI 元素集合，专门用于加速生物信息学软件的开发。在 GC4S 中，新应用程序的开发人员可以专注于其项目的特定 GUI 需求，依靠 GC4S 来处理一般性和抽象性问题。GC4S 是根据 GNU Lesser General Public License 条款发布的免费软件，源代码和文档均可在 http://www.sing-group.org/gc4s 上获得。
