After the excitement around BiVi, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss all the work put into both a BioJS presentation at BiVi, and BioJS Workshop in the afternoon after BiVi.
We’re already avid BioJS fans at InterMine, because BioJS provides easy plug-in visualisations (for example, cytoscape). I’d expected that a Venn diagram depicting the BioJS crowd would intersect almost perfectly with the BiVi crowd, so I was surprised to find that they were actually completely separate groups.
The difference was explained to me by Manny Corpas as follows: While BioJS, given the (mostly) browser nature of Javascript, is indeed about visualisations – not all of it is dedicated to visual things. BioJS modules can be related to data parsing, for example.
On the other side of things, BiVi is about visualisation – no matter the language. Indeed, quite a few of the demos we saw at BiVi were desktop or server based, and unrelated to Javascript at all.
The workshop covered the basics of Javascript development, and shown how to include/interact with BioJS components on a webpage – but the most interesting sessions for me (as someone who makes a living out of writing Javascript, among other things) was definitely the session at the end where we were talked through creating our very own BioJS component.
Dennis Schwartz bravely live-coded a pie chart using d3.js on a projector – not an easy task! We started by setting up the scaffolding of the project using the BioJS Slush generator. This created examples, set up a build process, and ensured the BioJS pre-requisites were present, like licence and tags (which allows the biojs registry sniffer to pick up biojs packages from the npm registry). Despite only having an hour or so to get it all done, by the end we had each coded a functioning basic component.
The workshop finished off nicely with group pizza to feed hungry biojshackers. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the hackathon the next day, but if its quality was anything like the workshop, I’m sure it must have been a fabulous success.
InterMine 