ACE97 Meeting Summary

As usual the meeting produced some interesting and unexpected results. Detailed information about the meeting, including tutorials, presentations, new developments and new documentation can be found on the Proceedings page which is at /acedocs/ace97/proceedings.html.

The first day and a half, which was devoted to tutorials, was an overwhelming success. In many cases, the tutorial room was filled to overflowing. The next day and a half was devoted to presentations concerning various aspects of ACEDB use.

As was true at ACE95 and ACE94 the workshop, which filled the remainder of the two weeks was extremely productive and several spontaneous collaborations emerged.

One of the main goals, of course, was the release of a new version of ACEDB. Version 4.5 was released as a test version - it can be retrieved in the usual place: ftp://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/repository/acedb. The new version has increased functionality and displays.

More interesting, many new projects were begun that will likely redefine the way ACEDB is used in the future. Central to much of this was the development (and partial implementation) of a C library interface for ACEDB. The specification contains several dozen C functions will simplify new development for ACEDB. It is very likely that this will speed the development of new displays and will allow the development of new interfaces for ACEDB in several languages including Java, Perl, and C++. In addition, it will make it easier to develop new aceservers which use various protocols including CORBA and sockets. Along these lines, efforts to develop a Java-based CORBA client/server package for ACEDB and a Java interface to ACEDB (JACE) were initiated.

Another major advance was the development of a new query language for ACEDB called AQL. An AQL parser was developed and it was partially implemented during the workshop. A useful new feature of the language is that the results of a query can produce a table.

A new version of the webace interface was developed. Instructions for installing perl with aceclient functionality were enhanced and bugs were fixed. The webace code itself was debugged. Also, a new version of the aceserver which produces gif images was made available with ACEDB 4.5 and this was made to work with the new webace. The use of javascript has improved on the original webace mode of interacting with the gif images.

Work was completed on a new version of the Oxgrid display and progress was made on enhancing and generalizing the Metabolism display.

A huge win for PC fans came in the form of Winace which was conceived at ACE95 and reached the production release stage at ACE97. Winace works on Windows NT and Windows 95 machines. Winace was able to successfully load all of the worm data.