Senger M, Glatting K H, Ritter O, Suhai S
Department of Molecular Biophysics (0810), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1995 Feb;46(2):131-41. doi: 10.1016/0169-2607(94)01610-r.
Management and analysis of nucleotide and protein sequence and structure data constitute a traditional area of bioinformatics. Since the analytical programs are frequently developed by researchers, rather than software engineers, they tend to suffer from idiosyncratic and non-ergonomic man-machine interfaces. We report on HUSAR, our 140+ collection of third-party, as well as in-house developed or adapted, sequence manipulation and analysis tools, well integrated into the UNIX operating system environment and accessible via consistent menu-aware interface. Most of the HUSAR programs can be completely specified by UNIX command-line options; they can thus be run in batches or combined into pipes. Adding such a program into the HUSAR environment is almost a 'plug-and-play' exercise. HUSAR has been recently complemented with a graphical client interface, X-HUSAR, to support users on UNIX platforms with X11 windowing systems. The whole X-HUSAR interface is based on a single generic program, COMLIGEN, and a number of specific configuration files. COMLIGEN interprets those files and renders appropriate windows, menus, and other interactive elements, which help the end user in selecting application programs and specifying their options. Efforts of extending both HUSAR and X-HUSAR are roughly linear to the size of the collection.
核苷酸和蛋白质序列与结构数据的管理和分析构成了生物信息学的一个传统领域。由于分析程序通常是由研究人员而非软件工程师开发的，它们往往存在特殊的、不符合人体工程学的人机界面。我们报告了HUSAR，它包含140多个第三方以及内部开发或改编的序列操作和分析工具，这些工具很好地集成到UNIX操作系统环境中，并可通过一致的菜单感知界面访问。大多数HUSAR程序可以通过UNIX命令行选项完全指定；因此，它们可以批量运行或组合成管道。将这样一个程序添加到HUSAR环境中几乎是一个“即插即用”的操作。HUSAR最近补充了一个图形客户端界面X-HUSAR，以支持具有X11窗口系统的UNIX平台上的用户。整个X-HUSAR界面基于一个通用程序COMLIGEN和一些特定的配置文件。COMLIGEN解释这些文件并呈现适当的窗口、菜单和其他交互元素，帮助最终用户选择应用程序并指定其选项。扩展HUSAR和X-HUSAR的工作大致与工具集的规模呈线性关系。
