The MPR web site <A HREF=""""""""http://mpr.nci.nih.gov/"""""""">http://mpr.nci.nih.gov<A>has continued to be widely utilized by the biological community and its utilization continues to grow at a robust rate. This year the site continued to undergo a major multi-component improvement in infrastructure. The fundamental transition from the Microsoft .NET framework to Ruby on Rails (ROR) is largely complete, without any interruption in service to the community. The rationale was that the proprietary.NET architecture has not evolved to be nearly as efficient in implementation or alteration as was widely anticipated. In contrast, ROR is a very powerful, open-source framework for developing database-backed web applications. The emerging evidence indicated to us that ROR was on a trajectory similar to that of Linux in its early days, and was becoming the framework of choice for database driven web applications like MPR. Considerable effort has been involved in our enhancing the education of the staff of NCIWeb in this area;moreover the NIH/NCI policies and conventions often constrain adoption of new approaches, which we have experienced in this case and have had to develop robust workaround. Moreover, we have also been interacting with CIT investigating the feasibility of supporting these services on CIT servers, which would further broaden their usefulness to the NIH community more generally. The other key progress is developing approaches for semi-automatic update of web site information via more computer-facilitated exchange of information with companies. In the long run this well be essential for efficient maintenance and updating of information on the site. However, most of the companies generating such antibodies are not sufficiently software/database savvy to be highly interested in this. But one of the excellent high-volume companies has been motivated to explore such options and we are close to completion of the pilot project in semi-automated update.
