A lot of time has passed since I posted the first part of this blog series, which is mostly due to customer projects. Lately, I have also been busy implementing our NGS cancer analysis pipeline and software for representing the results. The product is really exciting, and we will post about it in the near future.
In the first post of this series I implemented an efficient query that calculates a histogram of microarray measurement data. In this post I will show my favourite method of implementing visualization in web environment. In the early days of web development we used to produce lots of code writing HTML tags to a stream to the browser. Today, several frameworks exist to make the life of the developer a lot easier. My favourite tool to build a data-centric web application is Oracle APEX. It is a declarative rapid web application development tool and it executes completely inside the database. Instead of writing the explicit steps how to create a user interface, APEX provides a point-and-click application builder (which is also implemented using APEX) where the developer creates pages using built-in components and plugins. APEX provides configurable components (reports, charts, buttons, input fields, etc) and wizards to help creating pages or regions based on existing database objects, such as tables.
A declarative model is great for productivity in cases where the requirements can be implemented using the provided functionality. The downside is the decreased productivity when something a bit more exotic is needed. If the provided component does not support extending the functionality, then the functionality has to be implemented by printing HTML/javascript/css fragments.
