by Henrik Bengtsson 2002-2005.
The below part is cut-n-pasted from aroma.Base help pages and the MGED8 poster [1]. For the most up to date version, please see the aroma.Base package.
The BioArray Software Environment (BASE) [2] is a free web-based database system for microarray experiements. It stores and analyses large amounts of data covering everything from array design to statistical analysis. In addition to built-in methods, BASE utilizes third-party plugin modules to analyze data. To date, plugins have been written mainly in Perl, C/C++ and Java, but few supportive methods are available to do this in a generic manner.
We have developed a plugin dispatcher that ease the effort to develop BASE plugins in R and which provides immediate access to the large CRAN and Bioconductor reprocitories for statistical analysis. The plugin dispatcher encapsulates common tasks such as parsing BASE file structures passed to the plugin from BASE, loads plugin specific R code, provides rich log methods, calls the plugin specific code with automatic exception handling, and returns data back to BASE. In addition, reports can easily be generated from R Server Page (RSP) templates. The actual plugin is defined by a single method that takes the pre-processed assay data, which is accessible via a well-defined application protocol interface (API), as the first argument, and the plugin parameters as the following arguments. Data returned by the method is interpreted and returned to BASE in correct format by the plugin dispatcher.
This is a cross-platform package implemented in plain R. This package depends on the packages R.oo [3] and R.utils packages. If reports are generated, it also depends on the R.rsp package [4]. Note that BASE does not have to be installed in order to develop plugins.
To install this package, please follow the instructions at http://www.braju.com/R/.
[1] Henrik Bengtsson, A generic R plugin dispatcher for BASE, Poster presentation, MGED8, September 11-13, 2005, Bergen, Norway.
http://www.maths.lth.se/bioinformatics/publications/BengtssonH_2005-PosterOnAromaBase.A4.pdf
[2] Lao H. Saal, Carl Troein, Johan Vallon-Christersson, Sofia Gruvberger, Åke Borg, and Carsten Peterson. BioArray Software Environment (BASE): a platform for comprehensive management and analysis of microarray data. Genome Bio., 3(8):SOFTWARE0003, 2002.
[3] Henrik Bengtsson, The R.oo package - Object-Oriented Programming
with References Using Standard R Code, In Kurt Hornik, Friedrich
Leisch and Achim Zeileis, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd
International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing
(DSC 2003), March 20-22, Vienna, Austria.
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/Proceedings/
[4] Henrik Bengtsson, The R.rsp package - R Server Pages, 2005.
http://www.maths.lth.se/help/R/R.rsp/
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