External contribution is important to the success of the project. External EMBOSS developers are well supported:
The source code is fully documented.
SRS databases help to search and navigate the code.
The myemboss EMBASSY package is provided for local development.
The GNU tools (automake, libtool, etc.) are used for building myemboss and the main package.
The EMBOSS Developers Guide provides comprehensive documentation for software developers.
The EMBOSS Administrators Guide provides comprehensive documentation for system administrators.
The EMBOSS Web Site provides auxiliary and reference documentation for developers and administrators.
A mailing list (Section 1.4, “Project Mailing Lists”) for discussions about development can be subscribed to.
A mailing list (Section 1.4, “Project Mailing Lists”) for reporting bugs has a good response time.
A developer training courses is available.
Example application code illustrating the use of each library is in development.
The EMBOSS C programming libraries (AJAX and NUCLEUS) provide a toolkit for rapidly creating robust bioinformatics applications. They provide:
A comprehensive set of basic functions, e.g. general string handling, pattern matching, sorting, iteration and fast database indexing.
Extensive libraries for sequence manipulation and analysis.
Additional programming libraries for core areas.
Consistent application programmers interface (API). The developer need not know the internals to use the libraries; knowledge of the function parameters and outputs (which are documented) is sufficient.
Functions are well documented.
Functions and function parameters have standardised names.
All code in ANSI standard C.