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Team:Freiburg Software/Project/Prospect
From 2010.igem.org
Prospects
In this section of the page we want to tell you about the plans we have for SynBioWave in the future.
SynBioWave was developed on Google Wave, in fact it was one of the first major projects for the platform when Wave got released in 2009. Google Wave itself however did not get the reputation Google was hoping for so in the late summmer of 2010 they announced the end of the Development and said they would shut down the Google Wave servers by the end of 2010.
Google is shutting down Google Wave, so SynBioWave is doomed, right?
WRONG! While it is true that SynBioWave was developed and currently only runs on Google Wave, Google has promised to make the whole Wave Protocol open-source and give it to the large developer community that has formed around it in the last 2 years.
This offspring of Google Wave will be called Wave-in-a-box and is currently in a pre-release stage. The Wave Protocol Summit will take place in San Francisco at the beginning of November 2010. There Wave Developers from all over the world will meet and discuss the last details of Wave-in-a-box.
In the end it will probably take some effort to adjust SynBioWave to the new Environment, but people will then be able to run their own servers and will no longer rely on Google.
Furthermore an open source client will probably give us the opportunity to integrate SynBioWave even better into the wave, for example the SynBioWave menu could be integrated into the wave menu, so people will no longer have to scroll all the way up to access it.
Safety Issues
A question that often arises when we present SynBioWave to potential Users is: "How safe is our data, if everything is shared and stored on some external Webserver?".
Wire tapping is not a problem in wave communication, because it uses the HTTP Secure protocol, that means all data sent and received is SSL encrypted. Lots of people are concerned about Google's privacy policy and so they are skeptical about storing research data on their servers. The best way to deal with these kinds of concerns is to set up your own wave server which will be very easy once Wave-in-a-Box is available.
Our robots currently run on Appengine - which is also a Google project - and use the internal Datastore. But since two month it is possible to host robots on an own java application server and use a JDO compatible database.
Other plans
Dealing with the end of Google Wave is definitely one of the major things we will have to care about in the future. There are however other things we want to do to make SynBioWave better.
GUI
With GWT and Cobogwave it is possible to develop whole Java Applications that run inside the wave.
Currently each instance of SynBioWave consists of 3 Wavelets: the one where all the interaction takes place and the workspace where all the sequences are stored. We would like to add a third wavelet with a new display gadget, so users can look at and edit their sequences and annotations in a more detailed and intuitive way. We already made a prototype of this using the Google Web Toolkit.
Google Web Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. The Cobogwave Project allows Developers to write GWT applications and include them into the Wave as Gadgets. Since GWT allows for much more complex we might eventually port the whole project to GWT. Read more about this here.
Database Access
In SynBioWave you already have access to the Parts Registry (since it is an iGEM project). But we also want to include import functions for other databases like Genbank, EMBL and DDBJ.
Add-on Robots
Of course the add-on robots as we present them at the jamboree are just a snapshot of their ongoing development. We will continue to improve their functions and add new ones. Please refer to the robots page if you want to know more about our plans with them.
