GBrowse 2.0 HOWTO

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This document is a work in progress. It describes how to install and configure GBrowse 2.0

Introduction

GBrowse 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the original GBrowse version. In addition to making the code base more maintainable, GBrowse 2.0 adds the following major features:

  • User Interface: The user interface uses AJAX to provide a smoother user experience. Tracks turn on and off immediately, and updates affect only the tracks that have changed.
  • More rational configuration: Most configuration options have been moved into a single shared configuration file. This allows data source-specific files to be shorter and more concise. This also increases the performance for sites that use hundreds of configuration files to display annotations on multiple species because only the global configuration file and the source-specific configuration file need to be read.
  • Multiple database support: You can now declare multiple databases for each data source and attach them to different tracks. This allows you to add and remove genome annotation data sets far more easily than in earlier versions.
  • Slave renderer support: If you have a multi-CPU processor, or access to several machines, you can distribute the tasks of reading the databases and rendering tracks across multiple processes and machines via a series of "slave" renderers. This greatly increases performance.

For Users of GBrowse 1.X

GBrowse 2.0 is largely backward compatible with GBrowse 1.X, but you will need to do some modest work in order to port existing sources to the new system. This section tells you what you should now.