title: How do you use Ruby on Rails for science (if applicable)?
body: <p>We do research in systems biology. We prefer to use existing data sets, because collecting new biological data is expensive. Thus, a lot of the scripts we write are little more than transformations of one data set into another.</p>
  
  <p>Eventually, we put our results online -- and more and more journals are requiring this sort of thing.</p>
  
  <p>So it was no great leap for me to try using Rails for my projects. I can set up easily reproducible experiments, transform data step by step through database tables (e.g. using rake), and display results using gems like <a href="http://github.com/xdotcommer/flotomatic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">flotomatic</a> and the gnuplot. If I need something to run very quickly, I can even write a custom gem in C++ using <a href="http://rice.rubyforge.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Rice</a>, or parallelize using <a href="http://github.com/starling/starling" rel="nofollow noreferrer">starling</a> and <a href="http://github.com/purzelrakete/workling" rel="nofollow noreferrer">workling</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Eventually, I started to wonder if anyone else was using Rails to do bioinformatics or science in general.</p>
  
  <p>I thought, "If I were a science research Rails gem, what would I do?"</p>
  
  <p>What extra features would such a gem have? Perhaps a Migration adaptation into a rake-able pipeline? Maybe more advanced graphing features? Built-in background jobs?</p>