TABLE OF CONTENTS
Gmaj can be run in two different modes: as a stand-alone application (for viewing local data files yourself) or as an applet over the world-wide web (to display your data on a server for viewing by others). Both forms of the program are distributed together, so the initial download and unpacking instructions are the same. Setting it up as an applet, however, requires some additional steps: ensuring that Gmaj and the data files you want to display are accessible to your web server, and building a web page to run the applet.
Gmaj is available for download as a compressed zip archive,
gmaj.zip. This was created with the Java jar tool,
but the format is compatible with PKUnzip and many other unzip
programs. Unzipping the archive will produce
gmaj.jar (a jar file containing the program itself)
and a docs subdirectory containing some
documentation files in HTML format. If your unzipper program
does not preserve the directory structure and complete file
names from the archive, you may need to move and/or rename the
documentation files manually in order for the "Help - Manual"
function to work. Note that the gmaj.jar file does
not need a second round of unzipping -- Java will access it
"as is". If you are setting up Gmaj as an applet, be sure to
unzip the archive in a directory/folder that will be accessible
to your web server, e.g., a new gmaj directory
somewhere in the server's document space.
If you are running Gmaj in stand-alone mode, you will also need to have Java installed on your computer. For applets, the server does not need Java but the end user does; you may want to mention this on your Gmaj web page. In both cases Java 1.3 or higher is required, and for best compatibility Sun's JRE (or JDK) is recommended.
For stand-alone mode, that's all there is to the installation; you will specify different start-up parameters for Gmaj each time you run it (see Starting and Running Gmaj). The remaining sections on this page apply only to applet setup.
In addition to the alignment data, Gmaj can display several kinds of annotations, including genes/exons, repeats, linkbars, color underlays, text highlights, and reconstruction scores for ancestral sequences, with a meta-data parameters file to tie them all together. For detailed descriptions of these files and their format requirements, please see Input Files for Gmaj.
When setting up Gmaj as an applet, the data files must be
accessible to your web server. Also, due to Java security
restrictions, they must all be located on the same server as the
gmaj.jar file, because an applet is normally only
allowed to contact the same server it was loaded from. We find
it convenient to group the files for each invocation (e.g., each
genomic region) in a separate subdirectory of the
gmaj directory. It is also possible to bundle them
into a single zipped data file for each invocation, which eases
both storage requirements and download time (discussed further
in Input Files for Gmaj).
The last step in setting up the applet is to create a web page on your server that invokes it with the appropriate parameters for loading your data files. The applet normally appears as a labeled button that opens a Gmaj window when the user clicks on it; thus you can have several buttons on the same page, each set up to display a different set of data. The basic format of the HTML code looks like this:
<applet code="edu.psu.bx.gmaj.MajApplet.class"
archive="gmaj.jar"
width="200" height="30">
<param name=paramfile value="/java/gmaj/alpha/demo.gmaj">
<param name=bundle value="/java/gmaj/alpha/demo.zip">
<param name=buttonlabel value="Alpha-globin">
<param name=nobutton value="false">
<param name=initzoom value="mouse 110000 147000">
<param name=posturl value="/cgi-bin/save-posted-file.pl">
<param name=urlpause value="100">
<param name=debug value="false">
<i>Your browser is not responding to the <applet> tag.</i>
</applet>
This particular fragment is based on the alpha-globin example
from our server; naturally you need to replace the values with
your own file URLs, button label, etc. A few things to note:
gmaj.jar file is not in the same
directory as your web page, you'll need to supply the path
to it in the archive attribute.
width and height attributes
are for the button, not the Gmaj windows.
<param name=... lines
(paramfile and bundle); the
others are optional.
nobutton parameter is set to
"true", Gmaj will proceed to open its window
immediately instead of displaying a start button.
initzoom parameter specifies an initial
zoom setting to be applied when the window opens. The user
can still invoke the Unzoom or Set Zoom features
interactively to see the entire sequence range. The
sequence name must match one of the names from the alignment
file(s), and the endpoints must include the offset (if any)
for that sequence from the parameters file. To specify the
reference sequence without a zoom region, use -1
for both endpoints.
posturl parameter designates a URL on your
server where exported alignments should be sent. By default
the Export feature is not available in applet mode, because
applets generally can't write to the user's local disk due
to security restrictions. However, by specifying this
parameter you can enable the applet to send the exported data
to your server instead (typically a CGI script). The output
is sent via an HTTP POST request using the MIME protocol for
web forms; currently for applets the export file format is
always MAF, and the filename is always
Gmaj_output.maf.
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=______AaB03x --______AaB03x Content-Disposition: form-data; name=file_data; filename=Gmaj_output.maf Content-Type: application/octet-stream [MAF file contents, in plain ASCII with platform-dependent line breaks] --______AaB03x--
urlpause parameter specifies how many
milliseconds the program should pause before retrieving each
file from a URL, in order to avoid overloading your server.
debug parameter is set to
"true", Gmaj will print a few extra warning
messages in the browser's Java console if certain problems
occur. Normally you won't need this, as it is mainly for
development purposes.