13.6. Conclusion

This chapter has been about one of the prettier pieces of code I've written. The program serves a useful purpose for biomedical researchers. The cart system makes it relatively easy to construct an interactive program over the Web, even though it uses a CGI interface. Both the user's model and the programmer's model of the program revolve around the idea of a big table with one row per gene and a variable number of columns that can represent many different types of data.

Although the Gene Sorter is written in C, the column code is done in a straightforward, polymorphic, object-oriented design. Additional columns can be added by editing simple text files with no additional programming required, and these same files help make it easy for a single version of the program to work on different genomic databases associated with a variety of organisms.