Bluejay: A Browser for Linear Units in Java

Abstract: The World Wide Web illustrates the power of using a common, simple markup language (HTML) to describe distributed documents. To expand this power to other types of data, a system for the markup and visualization of linear data is introduced. The Browser for Linear Units in Java (Bluejay) is composed of three main components: (i) a set of Java foundation classes for data parsing, visualization, and user event handling, (ii) an HTTP proxy server for data conversion, and (iii) Java classes implementing the user interface for a particular application of the browser. Bluejay users can efficiently browse specialized data on the Web, concentrating on information of particular interest to them. This is achieved through the use of the W3C’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the data format, a data conversion server, and a document components tree which can be configured to restrict the type of data shown. An application of Bluejay for browsing genetic sequence data encoded in BIOML (an XML) is described to demonstrate the principles of the system. Creating an integrated view of heterogeneous, distributed genetics and genomics databases, the application illustrates the usefulness of borrowing the HTML browser paradigm to create specialized data visualization using XML. Despite the use of proxy servers and drawing abstraction, data retrieval and display performance is kept high through the use of special caching techniques for the proxy, and simple module replacement in the application.