Data External Data DAS ServersSetting up your own DAS server is straightforward and is ideal for viewing large sets of data or annotations from your own site in Ensembl or elsewhere. DAS is an excellent collaboration tool, allowing you to quickly and easily share data with other research labs.
Depending on the amount and type of data you have, there are different ways to run an annotation server to add features to the Ensembl data or to other DAS client implementations. They vary in what programming language and web services your site needs to support.
Dazzle is a Java based DAS server developed by Thomas Down at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It is an advanced and stable server solution which runs as a servlet within either the Tomcat or Resin servlet containers. Both the Ensembl reference server and the UniProt reference server are running Dazzle. Dazzle is a good choice if you already are familiar with e.g. Tomcat and/or Java.
The Dazzle home page contains a deployment guide for the server and also a description of how to set up a mirror of the Ensembl reference server.
ProServer is a Perl based DAS server developed by Roger Pettett at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Its strength is that it is extremely light weight and modular. It does not require any pre-existing web server installation and it may be adapted to serve DAS features from virtually any underlying data store.
ProServer is the server implementation that we recommend people try first, especially if they have Perl programming skills in-house.
There are a number of documents describing how to set up ProServer:
Diplo, by Andreas Kähäri at the The European Bioinformatics Institute, is a DAS server in the same style as ProServer, i.e. it is a Perl-based DAS server which aims at being light-weight and modular and does not depend on any pre-existing web server installation. The feature list of this implementation includes the following:
The Diplo home page contains an up-to-date list of features, the latest snapshot releases, and documentation.
The Lightweight DAS server (LDAS) was the first widely available DAS server solution. It was written in Perl by Lincoln Stein, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). It relies on a separate MySQL database for storing all annotation features.
