[Biococoa-dev] BioCocoa invitation

[Koen van der Drift]

Hi guys,

I wrote this 'invitation' that we can send out to possible new 
developers. Let me know if you think this is ok, and if I missed 
anything.

cheers,

- Koen.

-------------------------


Dear FooBar,

I found your name on the CocoaDev mailing list. I am one of the core 
developers of the BioCocoa project, an open source framework for 
reading, writing, and manipulating various biological sequences. 
Originally the framework was aimed also at GNUStep and only focused on 
reading and writing sequences, which is still the official version that 
you can download from the website at 
http://bioinformatics.org/biococoa/. A few months ago a couple of mac 
loving bioscientists joined the project, and it was transformed in a 
Cocoa-only framework, and extended to be able to do other things with 
sequences than reading and writing. You could say that it is trying to 
be the Cocoa/Obj-C sibling of BioJava, BioPerl, etc.

So far we have created a set of new classes, that we believe should be 
a solid base for extending the whole framework. However, we still have 
many discussions  what would be the best design. For instance, 
currently we have a core class BCSequence, with various subclasses for 
DNA, RNA, and proteins. We have had many discussions whether we 
actually should subclass BCSequence (eg BioCocoa doesn't subclass it's 
main sequence class). Recently we have been discussing if maybe we 
should use the class cluster design for the various sequence classes,

At the moment we are only a small group of developers, mainly with a 
scientific background. Based on the description on the CocoaDev 
webpage, it seems you could be a valuable addition to the BioCocoa 
project. So we were wondering if you would be interested in joining the 
development team, and the discussions on our mailing list (see 
http://bioinformatics.org/project/?group_id=318 for more info).

Feel free to have a look at the code and the current discussions, and 
let me or one of the other developers know if you are interested. We 
look forward to your reply,

On behalf of the BioCocoa Team, best regards,


Koen van der Drift