I was thinking of creating my own as a Ruby on Rails engine to hook into the lab's existing site. I don't want to reinvent the wheel though. - Michael Barton

instead of implementing your blast search on the server side, why about creating a web services to search and retrieve the sequences and then, people can submit it to whatever they want (taverna...) - Pierre Lindenbaum

Like create a web service, then wrap the webservice API in a website front end? - Michael Barton

Your web site would propose a set of web services: just like the NCBI (e-utils). Then people do whatever they want with your data. But you can also write with some interactive HTML forms. I like this idea of "generic DNA sequence database". - Pierre Lindenbaum

That's a good idea. It's what Neil was talking about on his blog this morning, about having a good API to bioinformatics web services. - Michael Barton

BioMart? - pn

I like the idea of a simple, generic database with web front-end that supports storing structured data, versioning it, searching it, and plugging in analysis tools (which might run local or remote via whatever API). - Eric Jain

Eric ... wouldn't we all. Doesn't happen too often though - Deepak Singh

@Paulo BioMart looks like a good option. GMOD was suggested in the answers on stack overflow. I think these would both have good APIs. - Michael Barton

There's several GMOD components which may help here, lots of wheels so probably no need to reinvent any. See overview at http://gmod.org/wiki/Overview, more specifically a couple of relevant bits are Tripal (Drupal front end to a Chado db http://gmod.org/wiki/Tripal), and GMODweb (http://gmod.org/wiki/GMODWeb) - 'Mummi' Thorisson

we had started on a similar venture way back and using the Gmod tools and a rails frontend. http://rubyforge.org/project... - george