Using Ruby for Bioinformatics Applications

When I started working in a bioinformatics research lab I quickly discovered the wonderful dynamic language that is Perl. I’ve spent a couple of years with Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics somewhere on or around my desk. Perl itself was designed with text-processing and reporting in mind so naturally it’s become widely used when handling biological data.
So everything bioinformatics should be coded in Perl, right? A couple of years ago I might have agreed, but now I feel differently. My first “Perl, I’m leaving you.” moment came when I discovered the way that Rails does web programming. Ruby is the magic in Rails, but I soon discovered Ruby goes much beyond web frameworks. To quote Ezra:

“I came for the Rails, but I stayed for the Ruby”

I wanted to compile some links to show how an active community is positioning Ruby to be a powerful language for bioinformatics programming:
BioRuby – open source bioinformatics library
BioRuby on Github

Web Frameworks

Ruby on Rails – the famous MVC framework that made ruby popular
Merb – fast, lightweight MVC framework
Camping – 5k microframework
Sinatra – web development DSL
Ramaze – simple, light, and modular web application framework
Rack – Webserver interface

Distributed/Parallel Computing

DRb- Distributed Ruby
SkyNet- Map Reduce in Ruby
Rinda – Linda parallel programming model in Ruby
rxgrid – Xgrid batch language
MPI Ruby – MPI bindings for Ruby
amazon-ec2 – Amazon EC2 API

Testing/Spec

RSpec – BDD framework
Test::Unit – Unit testing in the Ruby standard library

Integration with other programming languages

JRuby – JVM ruby implementation
SWIG and Ruby – automatically generate C interfaces
Ruby C extensions

Math/Statistics

Ruby-GSL – wrapper for the GNU Scientific Library
RSRuby- R statistics package in Ruby
SciRuby
Ruby NArray – similar to NumPy

Visualization/Graphics

Ruby Gnuplot – Gnuplot bindings
Ruby-Processing – The Processing language in Ruby
ruby-opengl – OpenGL bindings
Gruff – Graph API
Ruby-SVG – SVG Graphics
Ruby Gnuplot

Machine Learning

AI Related Ruby Extensions
Support Vector Machines in Ruby
Fast Artificial Neural Network library

Blogs about bioinformatics and Ruby

Saaien Tist – Jan Aerts, on bioinformatics and personal productivity
Bioinformatics Zen – Micheal Barton
Be sure to visit the Ruby for Bioinformatics room on FriendFeed for even more Ruby goodness.