ADAPTING ECOCYC FOR USE ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

The World Wide Web (WWW) offers the potential to deliver specialized i nformation to an audience of unprecedented size. Along with this excit ing new opportunity comes a challenge for software developers: instead of rewriting our software applications to operate over the WWW, how c an we maximize software reuse by retrofitting existing applications? W e have developed a Web server tool, written in Common Lisp, that allow s existing graphical user interface applications written using the Com mon Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) to hook easily into the WWW. This to ol - CWEST (CLIM-WEb Server Tool, pronounced ''quest'') - was develope d to operate with EcoCyc, an electronic encyclopedia of the genes and metabolism of the bacterium E. coli. EcoCyc consists of a database of objects relevant to E. coli biochemistry and a user interface, impleme nted in CLIM, that runs on the X-window system and generates graphical displays appropriate to biological objects. Each query to the EcoCyc WWW server is treated as a command to the EcoCyc program, which dynami cally generates an appropriate CLIM drawing. CWEST translates that dra wing, which can be a mixture of text and graphics, into the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and/or the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), w hich are returned to the client. Sensitive regions embedded in the CLI M drawing are converted to hyperlinks with Universal Resource Locators (URLs) that generate further EcoCyc queries. This tight coupling of C LIM output with Web output makes CLIM a powerful high-level programmin g tool for Web applications. The flexibility of Common Lisp and CLIM m ade implementation of the server tool surprisingly easy, requiring few changes to the existing EcoCyc program. The results can be seen at UR L http://www.ai.sri.com/ecocyc/browser.html. We have made CWEST availa ble to the CLIM community at large, with the hope that it will spur ot her software developers to make their CLIM applications available over the WWW.