Web EMBOSS is a "featured" WWW interface for EMBOSS, which provides personal work spaces alongside the server. It has been developed by Marc Colet (Belgian EMBnet Node) and Martin Sarachu (Argentinean EMBnet Node) who, very sadly, has passed away. Part of the early code was taken from Luke McCarty's "EMBOSS GUI". The layout of the pages is the work of the Web design company ZB22.
It is released under the GNU General Public License and can be downloaded from SourceForge (http://wemboss.open-bio.org/). To use it you only need a WWW client with support for PNG, JavaScript and "cookies"; it has been tested, and works well with Mozilla, MS Internet Explorer and Opera.
The main properties of wEMBOSS are :
Each program has a control panel that is "alive", thanks to JavaScript, so that wEMBOSS can adapt optional parameters according to choices made earlier by the user. It provides online access to the program manuals and a facility for searching programs by keyword. The manager of the site can decide to exclude programs from the installation (programs that only run in a terminal, like mse, and programs that update the internals of EMBOSS, like prosextract, are excluded by default).
wEMBOSS helps the user to manage rationally the input/output data of programs. They are stored permanently server-side in so-called "projects", which can be nested. A selector allows navigation from one project to another. One can readily re-view old results, copy data from one project to another, delete old data and use the data of a project within its different "subprojects".
wEMBOSS attaches a MIME label to some kinds of output data, which allows them to be "opened" automatically with an appropriate plug-in running on the users' PC. wEMBOSS also provides some additional "applets" (currently the Jalview sequence alignment viewer from the Geoff Barton group and the ATV phylogenetic tree viewer by Christian Zmasek).