Create a Biogem!

Creating a Biogem is easy. New biogems get added monthly!

Biogem provides a set of tools for those Bioinformaticans who want to start coding an application, or a library for using/extending BioRuby's core library and sharing the code as a gem through rubygems.org. Biogems are automatically listed at biogems.info when the gem is pushed to rubygems.org, using the biogem tool, and the name of the gem starts with bio- (bio dash), e.g. bio-fasta or bio-gff3.

Biogem aims to encourage open source software development, and provide tools to support bazaar programming. In our interpretation:

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch
Release source code early and often
With enough users, almost every problem is quickly known, and a fix obvious
Many heads are inevitably better than one
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

We suggest for bioinformatics

Use Ruby and Biogem software generation, or do not repeat yourself (DRY)!
Use the foreign function interface (FFI) for performance
Use unit tests and specifications (RSpec) for both agility and robustness