BioRails is currently at version 4.0
In collaboration with a large pharmaceutical company we're working to extend the BioRails platform to address the following areas:

• Request fulfilment and workflow
• Optimisation of the research cascade
• Automated compound stock information and ordering
• Integration with other ELN and LIMS
• Transparent access to results from corporate data warehouses

This solution will be commercially available as BioRails Cascade.

This work will also benefit the open version of BioRails in due course but for now we are continuing to work on the enterprise stream.

If you are interested in working with us on the BioRails project please contact us.

Ok Afraid been very quiet of open source stream. Mainly as been very hard at work on our Enterprise version and change for 4.0 now entering testing. Main changes coming are:-

1) New more sexy UI
2) Change to more flexible user defined folder structure
3) Support for complex tree and open dictionaries in catalogue
4) New more advanced query engine combining old reports and cross tabs functions
5) Word, openoffice and pdf now supported output format for documents.

Now 4.0 Enterprise is in testing hope get back to open stream and complete the update to rails 2.3.4 and sync the business objects models. So open and enterprise streams are compatible.

After 12 months have upgraded support site to match main "Edge":edge-ka.com site with a clearer lighter blue style. Also there are minor fixes throughout the site.

Key changes:-

• style to be consistent with main company site.
• assign_to users names sort by organization and name
• Integration with cruise control to show current status of automated testing
• Some new panels for my page
• some graphics for issue over time (firefox only)
• lots of cleanup/sorting of drop down lists

The enterprise edition of BioRails 3.2 has been released. Key features in this release include

• Catalogue
  • Improved user interface
  • Catagorisation of parameter types
• Folders
  • Extended electronic signatures to support
    • Prints for court
    • Direct output to Word(or Open Office)/PDF/RTF
• Teams
  • Assign tasks to teams and users
  • Task reports on Teams and Domains
• Reports
  • Support for multicolumn filtering
  • Improved user interface for cross tab reports

BioRails Opensource edition will be upgraded in the next few weeks although the electronic signatures enhancements will only be available in the Enterprise edition.

BioRails Status¶

We apologise for the apparent lack of changes on the core project. This is partly because we are victims of our own success. We have all been working very hard on customer projects and a number of large enterprise deployments. We have completed releases 3.1 and 3.2 of BioRails Enterprise in the past year. These focused on Oracle, LDAP and electronic signatures development. The open core has largely stayed as the 3.0 level and now needs some work to integrate back in these new features and big changes from the 4.x development stream. At present the open BioRails is in a 3.x -> 4.x transition as we move code into this stream. For the present those interested in using BioRails as application should contact us so we can discuss how best to support your needs.

4.x development¶

The initial 4.x change were focused on enterprise only features like electronic signature. Now we are progressing with a basic UI rework to simplify the interface, focusing on a improving navigation. The new UI is looking good and we are progressing towards a Q3 testing /Q4 release.

• [done] Sorted out jruby and rails 2.3 issues so application now run on all versions of rails and both native and java environments
• [done] Changed folder data versioning and signature infrastructure
• [done] Improved folder UI
• [done] add user defined dashboards structure
• [todo] Porting project/study/experiment and task view to new dashboards
• [todo] Rework of the reports/cross tab to produce a common UI
• [todo] advanced recipes combining structured data, document folders and reports.

packaging¶

We are currently assessing a reworks of the packages to produce a easy to install windows server. The current 3.x is largely based on rpm and msi installations which need a rework. Can now use the built in rails/apache environments on most linux distributions. For a portable windows/mac/linux install we will produce a simple java WAR and deploy with with glassfish or tomcat.

So progress is being made all be it off-line from the open project. We will be moving some of these developments into the open version and but make no apologies for needing to earn money to support further development of BioRails.

If you'd like to explore using BioRails for your organisation or personal use please do contact us, we'd love to help.

Recently the online open documentation for ruby on rails has under gone a make over, see http://guides.rails.info/ for the latest set. This now provides a really good starting point to learning the underlying framework to biorails.

Also for fans of microsoft visual studio there is a new all in one IDE from SapphireSteel (see http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-New-Free-Edition) this provide a single install to setup, ide, rails, ruby, mysql etc. Its good to see that all major development IDE now have solid support for ruby on rails available.

As biorails is now a large rails project, a simplified training example has been added to get started with
can get found at:-

http://biorails.org/svn/biorails/contrib/chemreg/

This is build so its really easy to covert this into a chemical inventory plugin in biorails. As long expected integrating into existing chemical inventory is most common customization for BioRails. This project provide a simple application to manage compound,batch, sample and containers.

A number of improvements written implemented in the Enterprise edition are being integrated into the Core product. These include

• UI changes with more Tabs and better arrangement of information generally.
• Lots of minor changes from customer feedback
• Move to access control lists for security

Currently the code is changing rapidly as working on getting all 2000 functional tests to pass with integrated changes.

New Redmine Base Site¶

This enables much better management of multiple projects. The core site has moved from trac to redmine see http://redmine.org. This provide much better issue managemnt and add forums,news and rss feeds etc. Even better was a ruby application it work well and hogs a lot less memory then the older trac system.

Migrations

• All tickets have been moved across for all the various project related trac sites. Old ticket references can be seen in the external_ref field in the new system of the format trac:project:nnn.
• Wiki pages under went some heavy gardening to clean up the information and update information. They should reflect the 3.x code base better now and be much better organized.
• User account and authorization is same as before

New Features

• Project can be private or public.
• Users project like biorails4office, morpthit, customer project should appear after login
• issue ticket can be enter of difference tracker for public-bugs, public-feature and private per project tickets
• people can monitor issue,news etc via rss
• forums are added for FAQ etc.

The BioRails Team is currently working on a 3.1 release.
See road map for details.

The Core wiki has been populated with sections on:

1. Project
2. Guides
3. Modules
4. Development
5. Glossary
6. Getting Involved