BioRuby: Open-Source Bioinformatics Library

BioRuby [1] is an open-source project which aims to provide a reusable library for biological tasks for the Ruby language [4]. Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented scripting language with a simple and powerful syntax and native object-oriented programming support. Ruby is developed by a Japanese author and is now accepted not only by Japanese but also by many professional programmers around the world as a highly productive language. Ruby has many advantageous features to process text files and for system management tasks, which are frequently needed for bioinformatics tools. Compared to other languages, it has native support for object-oriented programming with a simple but powerful syntax, with which we can easily describe and manipulate complicated biological data structures efficiently. These are the main reason why we decided to implement a bioinformatics library in Ruby, even though BioPerl [2], BioJava, and BioPython were developed previously. BioRuby is available as free software and is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It is available for download at http://bioruby.org/.