Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse

An unbiased list of systems biology, bioinformatics and chemoinformatics applications built on top of Netbeans pltform and Eclipse RCP. In all fairness, there is no clear winner. In fact with little variations both Eclipse and Netbeans can be used for similar kind of applications development.  Although number of Eclipse based RCP applications is less than Netbeans, eclipse based applications are quite mature and feature rich. For instance Bioclipse is one of the oldest and stable implementations in this area. KNIME is another very popular Eclipse based implementation with strong commercial and community support.  For visual editing jobs such as drag and drop applications Eclipse seems to be a better choice. Another difference is UI implementation, Eclipse relies on SWT – a Proprietary graphics system while Netbeans uses standard Swing toolkit which is 100% java implementation (check out these comparison tables). In addition, for OpenGL based graphics and rendering applications SWT offers three different options JOGL (Java OpenGL library), Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) and gljava.  Again from an end user perspective there is not much difference between Eclipse RCP and Netbeans platform applications.

Let me know if any application is missing from the list.

Eclipse

PubCurator

PubCurator is a biomedical text mining platform and validation helper built on top of Eclipse RCP.
PubCurator_Screenshot1

LabImage

LabImage platform offers a variety of modules for any user looking for comprehensive bio-imaging software with a workflow-guided approach and an easy way of working.
lane_b

Compass

Immunoassay analysis tool from Cell Biosciences.
Compass

KNIME

KNIME is open source workflow and data mining platform built on top of Eclipse platform. KNIME currently provides broad range of chemoinformatics and bioinformatics tools.
molecules_small

SBSIVisual

SBSIVisual is a desktop application whose provides easier way to run parameter estimation jobs for systmes biology models.
SBSIworkspace

Edinburgh Pathway Editor

EPE is a visual editor designed for annotation, visualisation and presentation of wide variety of biological networks, including metabolic, genetic and signal transduction pathways.
help_popup

Bio-PEPA

Bio-PEPA Workbench is an implementation of Bio-PEPA langugae which allows modellers to write models in the Bio-PEPA language and to animate them using stochastic simulation.
screenshot2

Bioclipse

Bioclipse provides advanced functionality in fields such as cheminformatics, bioinformatics, semantic web, spectrum analysis, drug discovery, safety assessment, and general chemistry education.
m2d_multi

ClustScan (the Cluster Scanner)

ClustScan can analyse the large amounts of data produced by sequencing projects (genome and metagenome data sets) and can generate good predictions of the most likely chemical products from these gene clusters, allowing identification of interesting clusters.
gkn685f1

BioUML

BioUML is designed as a common purpose framework for systems biology providing formalized graphic notation to describe the structure and function of biological systems, their visualization and simulation as well as access to databases with relevant experimental data.
BioUML

NetBeans

Quantitative Biology Tool

QBT provides users a convenient way to define, visualize, annotate, and simulate biological systems of interest.
qbt_ss_1

BioCAD

BioCAD is an platform for bio-network inference and analysis. BioCAD provides effective inference by incorporating various relevant information sources.
1471-2105-8-S9-S2-1

Bio-SPICE

Bio-SPICE is an integrated and modular platform for modeling and simulation of spatio-temporal processes in living cells. It can be used for computational and mathematical modelling of multi-scale bio-molecular systems.
dbimage

BiologicalNetworks

BiologicalNetworks platform allows querying and mapping over a large number of biological databases related to transcriptional regulation, pathways, microarray and proteomic experiments, 3D structures etc.
MicroarrayData

Gephi

Gephi is an open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs of all kinds including biological networks.
metricsresults

Instant JChem

Instant JChem is a desktop application for scientists to manage and work with chemical structures and data using local and shared databases.
lipidmaps-jchem-small

Visual Acorn

Acorn is a web server for constraint based modeling of genome-scale metabolic reaction networks.
acorn-4

GenBeans

GenBeans is a multiplatform interactive molecular biology software for DNA analysis.
gbshot2-small

ChIpInspector

ChipInspector is tool for high quality microarray data analysis and it works with data from exon-, tiling- or gene expression-arrays from vendors like Affymetrix, Illumina or Agilent.
ChemInspector

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19 Responses to “Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse”
  1. 09.04.2010

    Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9 #fisheye

  2. 09.04.2010

    Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9

  3. 09.04.2010

    Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9 #science

  4. 09.04.2010

    @rvijapurapu thanks for the pointer, here is the list http://goo.gl/v5nc

  5. 09.04.2010

    RT @abhsihektiwari: Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/c3J0ZO

  6. 09.04.2010

    Nice overview, thanx!

    I find it also notable that all this software is written in Java, and, licensing permitting, things can be combined… it would have been, therefore, useful to include license information, as it is the Open Source nature of many of these projects that provide solid shoulders to build on… these products are *not* the final thing, but just the next step in a scientific computing desktop.

    Otherwise, there are many dimensions that one could further explore: support for Open Standards, ability to do remote and/or cloud computing, or what underlying 3rd-party libraries are being used by these bioinformatics desktop environments.

    • abhishektiwari
      09.05.2010

      Thanks for you comment Egon. I see where you coming from, and I agree that licensing is a major bit. My idea was to just put some example from here and there to show up that Eclipse and Netbeans are used for similar kind of tasks. That was technical side of story. After that, I guess what you are saying is more valuable. That also reminds me the SWT implementation is proprietary and how much of that should be considered as reason that more people are using Netbeans just to avoid the mix up of different licenses?

  7. 09.04.2010

    RT @sysbio: Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9 #fisheye

  8. 09.04.2010

    Platform comparison Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse – http://bit.ly/9yhjFS

  9. 09.04.2010

    RT @sysbio Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9 #fisheye

  10. 09.04.2010

    RT @monacotoni: Platform comparison Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse – http://bit.ly/9yhjFS

  11. 09.04.2010

    Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/bZc9p4 Science.alltop

  12. 09.04.2010

    RT @sysbio Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse http://bit.ly/b4N8T9 #fisheye

  13. 09.08.2010

    Interesting list of Biology and Bioinformatic projects built on Eclipse and Netbeans http://bit.ly/9lLUo7

  14. 09.11.2010

    Nice overview of #Eclipse #RCP and #Netbeans based #bioinformatics and #systemsbiology platforms http://is.gd/f5qJX via @abhishektiwari

  15. Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse :::http://bit.ly/9yhjFS

  16. 09.27.2010

    2 more Eclipse RCP apps
    Pubcurator
    https://sourceforge.net/projects/pubcurator/

    and
    http://www.labimage.com/ – a commercial Eclipse RCP image analysis platform

    • abhishektiwari
      10.07.2010

      Thanks Richard for you comment. I just updated the list based on your input.

  17. 10.07.2010

    Updated list Platform for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: NetBeans vs Eclipse, Eclipse leads the numbers now – http://goo.gl/v5nc