Biodalliance: fast, embeddable genome visualization
Dalliance is a genome viewing tool that aims to offer a high
level of interactivity while working entirely within your web
browser. It works with current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and
Safari and (with minor visual glitches) Internet Explorer 11. It
is also usable with current mobile web browsers.
To try it, visit http://www.biodalliance.org/human37.html.
Development
Dalliance has now switched to a Gulp-based build
system. It it still possible to use the files in the js directory
directly, but this is now deprecated and may not be supported in future.
Before building, please install Node.js, which
is needed for the NPM package manager.
To build:
(sudo?) npm install -g gulp
npm install # Install dependencies
gulp # Build Dalliance
...then open any of the HTML files in the example-browsers
directory
to test.
Dalliance loads data via the DAS protocol.
There's a button to click that will let you add DAS sources. If what
you're after is in the registry, you should just be able to select and
add, otherwise you'll need to type a URL.
You can also add data directly from indexed binary files (currently
bigwig, bigbed and BAM, probably other formats in the future). Binary files
can either be hosted on a web server or loaded from local disk.
However, there is one caveat. Since Dalliance is a pure Javascript
program running in your web browser, it is normally subject to the
"same origin policy", which only permits Javascript code to access
resources on the same server. To get round this, DAS servers need to
support the W3C CORS extension. The
latest versions of Dazzle, Proserver and MyDAS should implement this by
default.
Reporting bugs
Dalliance is under active development and we welcome your suggestions.
Right now, probably the best place for bug reports or feature requests
is the Github issue tracker.
There is also a mailing list
where the project can be discussed.