OBF Google Summer of Code 2014 Wrap-up

GoogleSummer_2014logo In 2014, OBF had six students in the Google Summer of Code 2014™ (GSoC) program mentored under its umbrella of Bio* and related open-source bioinformatics community projects: Loris Cro (Bioruby) with mentors Francesco Strozzi and Raoul Bonnal; Evan Parker (Biopython) with mentors Wibowo Arindrarto and Peter Cock; Sarah Berkemer (BioHaskell) with mentors Christian Höner zu Siederdissen and Ketil Malde; and three students contributed to JSBML: Victor Kofia (mentors: Alex Thomas and Sarah Keating), Ibrahim Vazirabad (mentors: Andreas Dräger and Alex Thomas), and Leandro Watanabe (mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez and Chris Myers).

As a change from earlier years in which OBF participated in GSoC as a mentoring organization, in 2014 we purposefully defined our umbrella as much more inclusive of the wider bioinformatics open-source community, bringing it more in line with the annual Bioinformatics Open-Source Conference (BOSC).  In part this was also motivated by " paying it forward", a concept central to growing healthy open-source communities, after the larger domain-agnostic language projects such as SciRuby and PSF had extended an open hand to OBF mentors when OBF did not get admitted as a GSoC mentoring organization in 2013. In the end, four out of the six succeeding student applications were for projects outside of the traditional core Bio* projects, a result with which everyone won: We had a terrific crop of students, our community grew larger and stronger, and open-source bioinformatics was advanced in a more diverse way than would have been possible otherwise.

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Biopython 1.65 released

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.65 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.4, PyPy3 version 2,4, and Jython 2.7b2. The most visible change is that the Biopython sequence objects now use string comparison, rather than Python’s object comparison. [Read More]

Biopython 1.64 released

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.64 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, 3.3 and also the new 3.4 version. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.3, and Jython 2.7b2. The new experimental module Bio.CodonAlign facilitates building codon alignment and further analysis upon it. This work is from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project by Zheng Ruan. [Read More]

OBF Google Summer of Code students 2014

Hi all, I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of OBF’s Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) students: Sarah Berkemer - " Open source high-performance BioHaskell" (Mentors: Christian Höner zu Siederdissen, Ketil Malde) ( blog) Loris Cro - " An ultra-fast scalable RESTful API to query large numbers of VCF datapoints" (Mentors: Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal & the BioRuby team) ( blog) Victor Kofia - " JSBML: Redesign the implementation of mathematical formulas" (Mentors: Alex Thomas, Sarah Keating & the JSBML team) ( blog) Evan Parker - " Addition of a lazy loading sequence parser to Biopython’s SeqIO package" (Mentors: Wibowo Arindrarto, Peter Cock & the Biopython team) ( blog) Ibrahim Vazirabad - " Improving the Plug-in interface for CellDesigner" (Mentors: Andreas Dräger, Alex Thomas & the JSBML team) ( blog) Leandro Watanabe - " Dynamic Modeling of Cellular Populations within JSBML" (Mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez, Chris Myers & the JSBML team) ( blog) Congratulations to our accepted students! [Read More]

Call for Organization Admins for OBF's 2014 Google Summer of Code participation

Update: The deadline for responding has been extended to January 25. The 2014 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is coming up soon. The published timeline puts the mentoring organization applications from Feb 3 to 14. OBF participated on behalf of our member projects in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Those participations were both important and successful. Through them, our projects gained new contributors, new features, and new community members. The mentors involved from our projects learned as much from the experience as the students, and formed bonds. [Read More]

Biopython 1.63 released

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.63 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon) from the Python Package Index (PyPI). The current version removed the requirement of the 2to3 library. This was made possible by dropping Python 2.5 (and Jython 2.5). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, and also Python 3.3. The Biopython Tutorial & Cookbook, and the docstring examples in the source code, now use the Python 3 style print function in place of the Python 2 style print statement. [Read More]

Biopython 1.63 beta released

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.63 beta are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website. This is a beta release for testing purposes, the main reason for a beta version is the large amount of changes imposed by the removal of the 2to3 library previously required for the support of Python 3.X. This was made possible by dropping Python 2.5 (and Jython 2.5). This release of Biopython supports Python 2. [Read More]

Biopython 1.62 released

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.62 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon) from the Python Package Index (PyPI). Python support This is our first release of Biopython which officially supports Python 3. Specifically, this is supported under Python 3.3. Older versions of Python 3 may still work albeit with some issues, but are not supported. We still fully support Python 2. [Read More]

Biopython 1.61 released

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.61 are now available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). The updated Biopython Tutorial and Cookbook is online ( PDF). Platforms/Deployment We currently support Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 and also test under Python 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 (including modules using NumPy), and Jython 2.5 and PyPy 1.9 (Jython and PyPy do not cover NumPy or our C extensions). [Read More]

Travis-CI for Testing

Earlier this year BioRuby and then Biopython and BioPerl started using Travis-CI.org, a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community, to run their unit tests automatically whenever their GitHub repositories are updated: BioRuby Biopython BioPerl The BioRuby team are also using Travis-CI for automated testing of their new ‘plugin’ ecosystem, BioRuby Gems, or BioGems. Travis-CI gives us continuous testing, but for the moment only covers one operating system (currently 32 bit Ubuntu Linux using Virtual Machines). [Read More]