BLASTScanner 1.0 released

December 23, 2008 dg

At the 23. of december 2008 the first offical release of BLASTScanner has been released. BLASTScanner is a small platform independent console application which translates BLAST-output of the NCBI-BLAST-tool into database code. No installation is required. Just download unpack and run. A single C-Source file is compiled into a very fast and very small application (~30kb). For instance a 20MB-BLAST-file can be translated in 2 seconds into database code suitable being piped into SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL-databases. You can download binaries for Win32, Linux32 and Linux64, Mac-OSX, OSF1 and Solaris as well as the C-code for compilation for your platform all together in a 79kb-Zip-file from the sourceforge project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bioscanners/

C# scanner generator tested

November 2008, dg

There is the gplex scanner generator (http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/gplex/) for the C#-programming language. Due to the mono runtime environment (http://www.mono-project.com/) C# code can be run on Win32, Linux and Mac-OSX platforms. As our wc sample run below suggests gplex scanner generated code is slower than Java JIT-compiled code but faster than Java-interpreted code. The mono application requires much less memory.

wc-mono-static means that a executable with the mono-runtime linked in was tested. Mono-frameworks were 1.2 and 2.0.1. Different options for java memory were tested. java016 means that java was run with the -Xmx16m option.