[Biococoa-dev] I am watching you

[Charles PARNOT]

Hi List!

This is just a quick email to let you know I added myself to the list. I thought it would be nice of me to let all of you know I will be reading your stuff for a while.

I am interested in helping out at some point. However, I am not sure it is reasonable for me to do so at the present time, as I am quite busy with other things (well, who isn't?). I will thus just be watching and grabbing information, and maybe commenting a few times, and let you know when I am ready to commit more, if that ever happens. Here is some short background on me: I am a postdoc in Stanford University, working on the structural aspects of the adrenergic receptor activation, and more generally on GPCRs (G-protein coupled receptors). I am French, and got my  Ph.D. in Paris. I started writing some code about 2 years ago, first some Perl (still using it a lot), and now C/Cocoa, for my research (and for my pleasure at the same time, of course; I am really a big fan of Mac OS X and of Cocoa). You can read more about some of the stuff I am doing at:
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xgrid-stanford/

I have CVS-ed and browsed through the most recent version of the project, and I think I have a good understanding of the overall structure of BioCocoa, and even of some of the details. You do a really good job at commenting and organizing the code, and the overall design looks really good. I have also read the list archives for November and  December 2004. As a starter, I am humbly asking one of you, whenever he/she has time, to summarize the different design options you had in the past or are stille considering for the BCSequence object (from the archives, I could only grab part of the debate). I know this is quite a big question, but I don't ask for too many details, just a quick overview of the different options and I think I can fill in the blanks. Then a related question is: why do you need a BCSequenceFactory, and not just use factory methods defined in the BCSequence superclass (when unknown sequence type) or subclasses (when known types). I should add that I have no intention to question any of the design decisions ;-) , and don't want to revive any past debate, I just want to be brought up to speed...

Thanks to whoever answer those questions, and again, the BioCocoa project is a great initiative, and it looks really promising :-)

Charles

-- 
Charles Parnot
charles.parnot at stanford.edu

Help science go fast forward:
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xgrid-stanford/

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