Contributing¶
DISBi is an open source project released under MIT License. Everybody is welcome to contribute! There is always a need for better documentation, cleaner code and new features. To ensure long term code quality and consistency here are a few guidelines that you should heed when committing code to the project.
Design Goals¶
DISBi aims at presenting a general solution for data integration in Systems Biology. To do this the software pursues several goals.
- Data model independence
- To be able to adapt to the diverse requirements of different projects, all features should rely only on the abstract data model.
- Data management
- Data should be easy to manage through the admin interface. Moreover, the data should be made accessible through user friendly filter interfaces, that do not require knowledge of the underlying database structure.
- Data integration
- Data should be made available in an integrated manner that facilitates further analysis and discovery of underlying patterns. Moreover, one should be able to export the integrated data in commonly used formats.
- Preliminary analysis
- DISBi tries to support the researcher by automating common analysis routines. These should help in identifying data that is worthwhile for more in depth analysis. However, DISBi tries not to replicate the full functional scope of mature data analysis tools. Instead, it tries to give the user the freedom to export data in interchangeable formats and let him choose his own analysis tool.
If you have a contribution that surpasses the scope of the Design Goals, but is useful nevertheless, you should consider designing your contribution as a pluggable extension.
Style Guide¶
Python¶
Try to follow and PEP 8 the Google Style Guide as closely as possible. Everything should have at least a one-line docstring. Use Google Style for longer docstrings.
JavaScript¶
In general, follow the recommendations of the jQuery style guide and code examples presented in the jQuery documentation.