matt at perutz.salk.edu (Matthew Bowen Harrington) wrote:
>> I'd be interested in hearing opinions about the usefulness of GCG now
> that personal computers have become faster. I'm quite impressed with
> Lasergene from DNAstar. Plus, there's all sorts of things to be found
> on the Web. Is GCG worth it?
>> Matt Harrington
>
The answer of course is how much do you want your package to do.
Many people have noted that they really don't need to have
local databases on their site for their work: they just use
networked servers instead (mainly email in fact, not WWW).
However if you ever want to do something *serious* with your
sequences, you'll probably want to have a reduced dataset to
work with and run more complicated searches (eg profilesearches)
which are not currently available over the net.
If you are a programmer, GCG is (the only package?) which allows
some nice calls to the GCG code to allow your program to
use GCG's database management systems, which is remarkably useful
and a very positive feature of GCG.
And I believe that GCG is quite cheap for what it offers. You do
need though a mainframe machine (though some people have said
that it should be able to run on Linux) and probably some
dedicated systems person to look after databases and stuff, so
there are these "hidden" costs.
ewan birney
birney at molbiol.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.ocms.ox.ac.uk/~birney/me.htmlhttp://www.ocms.ox.ac.uk/~birney/palette.html
