Software Engineering is an undergraduate course designed to prepare students to program in the workplace by teaching them the importance of process, analysis, and design. One approach to teaching this course is to have the students use an all-Java framework to develop an application. Java, however, is not as prevalent as it previously was, so a more modern web-based framework could have more practical applications. The goal of this project was to develop and test a web-based, cloud framework for students to use to develop an application in a Software Engineering course. To achieve this goal, the team researched a React-based framework and built a sample application using it to prove its utility. The application was then deployed on the cloud using AWS EC2 and RDS. During development, the team created a series of useful resources and collected online resources to help future students learn the technology stack quickly, allowing them to focus on software methodologies, software design, and best practices.

MOTIVATION: The size and complexity of modern large-scale genome variation studies demand novel approaches for exploring and sharing the data. In order to unlock the potential of these data for a broad audience of scientists with various areas of expertise, a unified exploration framework is required that is accessible, coherent and user-friendly. RESULTS: Panoptes is an open-source software framework for collaborative visual exploration of large-scale genome variation data and associated metadata in a web browser. It relies on technology choices that allow it to operate in near real-time on very large datasets. It can be used to browse rich, hybrid content in a coherent way, and offers interactive visual analytics approaches to assist the exploration. We illustrate its application using genome variation data of Anopheles gambiae, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Freely available at https://github.com/cggh/panoptes, under the GNU Affero General Public License. CONTACT: [email protected].