Used Technologies

SynBioWave relies on a couple of technologies that it is built upon. On this page we list them and explain which part of them we use and why.

Google Wave

The Google Wave logo

Google Wave is a web application Google introduced in 2009 to unify and modernize different online collaboration and communication approaches. Everything within wave is done in real-time, for example text is displayed to other users instantly as you type it. Furthermore Wave can embed all kinds of media files such as pictures, music and videos.

Wave API
One important aspect about the Wave is its extendability. Developers can build software to extend the functionalities of Google Wave. There are two kinds of extensions: Robots and Gadgets. Learn more about them on the architecture page. Robots can be written in Python or Java, Gadgets are written in Java Script. SynBioWave is written in Java so we can make use of the BioJava library.

BioJava

BioJava is an open source project that provides a Java framework for bioinformatics programs. Biojava offers methods and data structures to work with biological data easily. Many parts of SynBioWave use the BioJava library, for example to parse different file formats.

Qooxdoo

Qooxdoo is one of the leading frameworks for creating rich internet application (RIAs). RIAs are web applications which are accessed from the browser and commonly made for multi user tasks. In contrast to usual web sites, RIAs look and feel like desktop applications. Building a RIA from scratch is nearly impossible. Therefore qooxdoo provides a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer.
Because Wave's user interface is only weakly customizable, qooxdoo is a perfect candidate to extend Wave's user interface with custom toolbars, buttons, forms, context-menus and much more.