Improve
Biobricks
At the time when we were trying to design our algorithms to handle the Biobricks Recommendation, we had an
urgent need for a function that we can search Biobricks by specific reactions, metabolites, and genes. As
a result, we began to communicate with some of the other iGEM-software teams, including UESTC-Software,
the best software team last year, trying to get a perfect solution for this. However, we realized that
none of the their projects could satisfy our needs. We spent lots of time and finally managed to design a
new algorithm based on feature extraction used for searching Biobricks that can meet our needs.
Platform
Different from the other iGEM-Software computing projects, Alpha-Ant, for instance, did not have any
convenient ways to share users' findings when using the software. Since collaboration in scientific
research is quite important, we developed a simple sharing function based on web-link generating.
Researchers with the links can easily edit on these models, favor them, and even give them a score.
Message Queues
Some of the iGEM-Software projects have computing tasks that will consume lots of computation resources
during executing. Most of them handle both this kind of task and the services to users in the same
server. The characteristics increase the risk of reducing the user experience and even breaking down the
whole server.
Foresyn split our programs computing models from our website, and use message queues to send and receive
information about our computation. A queue is a data structure that stores things waiting to be handled,
and it obeys the "First Come, First Serve" principle. So, we can store our computing tasks in the queue,
and response to users instantly about the progress of his tasks.
So the risk of breaking down does not exist anymore, and users can have a better experience.
References
- Figure 1:
http://www.netimperative.com/2019/04/facebook-sheds-light-on-news-feed-and-advertising-algorithm-secrets/
- Figure 2: https://rawcliffe.co.uk/tax-news/emi-share-option-schemes/
- Figure 3: https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/2014-12-03-what-is-message-queuing.html
