[Pipet Devel] Peep

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Pipers,

After an e-mail conversation with Deanne, she agreed to head-up the
development of the "Peep" UI for Piper.  "What the Hell is Peep???" you may
ask.  This is the textual UI or CLI that I spoke about recently and have been
planning for Loci since early this year.  Of course, Peep will interface with
the DL and not the Gnome (Pied) interface.  It will basically translate the
XML command stream into the more common human language of "English".

Being completely non-graphical, Peep will of course have many limitations.  It
won't, for example, be able to display Jean-Marc's lovely charts.  But
that's...okay.  We can think of Peep as being like the Lynx web browser.  It
can do most things, but not everything.

You may also ask, "What the f**k do we need that for???"  Well, if you'd
please watch your cursing I'll tell you.  Peep will allow Piper to be operated
without a windowing system.  This means Piper can be started via console,
through telnet, and even be more portable to other operating systems.  For
these reasons, I would also like Peep to be the default UI for Piper, not
Pied.

"Why the name Peep???" you say.  That's better.  "Peep" is a species of
sandpiper bird, our mascot.  It also means, in English, "a quick glance" and
"a short, sharp utterance".  I think it is a very fitting name.

"What language will Peep be written in???"  Python will allow Peep and Pied to
share a code base, so I think it would be best.

Any MORE questions? ;-)

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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