EMBOSS: Perl Support


Applications in ANSI C are simple to link with the libraries.

At the BioPerl workshop in Heidelberg just before ISMB99 there was interest in building a Perl front end to EMBOSS. Ewan Birney (Sanger/EBI) in Hinxton is part of the BioPerl consortium.

A simple Perl CPAN like wrapper module for EMBOSS, Emboss.pm, has been developed at Sanger by Richard Bruskiewich.

The wrapper simply takes emboss like arguments from within a Perl script, constructs the command line then runs the 'system' command to execute it. This arrangement may now work optimally for all uses of EMBOSS (any comments).

The next, more elaborate step, would be to attempt an XS type of API to EMBOSS, but that is more involved.

Issues:

  1. How best to integrate EMBOSS with Perl?
  2. How best to integrate EMBOSS with BioPerl?