Requirements

Hardware

BiSSAP should work on any system, that supports Java and operating systems mentioned before. However, planning to use BiSSAP you should be aware also of the hardware limitations. The comfort of working with such system is different. Please pay attention, that working with large sequence projects and files would require more memory, that working with the small ones. BiSSAP was tested on machines with modern processors, and 2GB RAM. The disk space required depends on the size of the files to be worked on. The new XML format takes a lot of space for remembering the tags, so the file could be a few times larger than raw sequence data. Please remember, that the data must be written in the internal database - that makes the space requirement at least twice as big. The uncompressed program takes about 60MB of disk space.

Minimal requirements:

  • 2 GB RAM
  • at least 60MB for installation
  • disk space for data (depending on the size of the data)

Software

BiSSAP is working on the following systems, provided that Java 1.5 is installed:

  • Windows XP
  • Windows Vista
  • MacOS X
  • Linux (any version) with GTK 32 bit

If you do not have Java installed, please go to the webpage http://java.sun.com/downloads. To run BiSSAP it it enough to have Java Runtime Environment (JRE), a full Java Development Kit (JDK) is not necessary. Please choose the latest version, however, all versions from 1.5 should be fine. Beware, that Java 1.6 is more efficient, so it can affects the performance. Installing the JDK or JRE is reasonably simple. Detailed, step-by-step instructions, if needed, are available in the HTML Sun Developer Network (SDN) Tutorial at the http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/install/index.html.

Installing BiSSAP

BiSSAP is distributed as a zip file. To install the file, please unzip it in your desired destination.

You should download the version, that matches your system. Java programs are generally platform independent, but Bissap uses a graphics library, that is system dependent (it also means, the look and feel can differ depending on the operation system).

  1. Go to http://www.epo.org/bissap
  2. Select and download the correct version for the operating system of your computer.
  3. Unzip (unpack) the file in the location on your computer. There is no installation program.
  4. You can also get some help form the screencast movies, that you can also download from the downloads page.
  5. To run the program, please act according to your operating system. The executable file name is bissap, sometimes with an extension depending on the system (on Windows, it is bissap.exe).
  6. To ease starting in the future, you could make a shortcut to this file on your desktop.

Uninstalling BiSSAP

BiSSAP does not do any change to the system files nor registry. To delete the application, it is enough to completely delete the BiSSAP directory, and the workspace (folder, where BiSSAP keeps its data).

In Windows, there is an uninstaller program. It is OK to use it. However, please pay attention that the uninstaller should remove all the created files (see screenshot) - please click "Delete All". If it does not, a new version of BiSSAP can crash (see Troubleshooting).

Running BiSSAP

You have to double click on the icon representing software. If you unzipped the archive in the bissap directory, it will be located in this directory. The name of the file depends on the operating system. In Windows it is bissap.exe, in MacOs and Linux it would be just bissap.

Alternatively, you can type the name of the BiSSAP application in the command line.

  • In Windows:
    • Select Run from Start menu
  • In MacOsX:
    • navigate to the BiSSAP directory, and then double-click on the BiSSAP executable.

When the BiSSAP is started, you should first observe the BiSSAP splash screen.

When the starting process is completed, you should see a welcome screen. Normally, a welcome screen is visible at first run only, but you can open it any time from main menu (Help -> Intro). You can click on some of the links to read some documentation, or close the welcome screen and start working.

Troubleshooting

BiSSAP crashes during startup

When changing BiSSAP versions, the old workspace files MUST be deleted.

The BiSSAP Windows uninstaller program does not remove workspace by default. Unless you tell the program "Delete All" when asked about the files created by BiSSAP (see screenshot), it leaves the old data, where the BiSSAP created them. Because the database structure sometimes changes to reflect new biological verification rules, it is possible the new BiSSAP cannot handle the old BiSSAP data and the result was an application crash.

Be sure to delete/clean the workspace when updating the BiSSAP installation.

Remember, that the only GUARANTEED way of moving the data to the next version is by official WIPO standard files, i.e. ST.25 and ST.26.

In other systems there is no installer/uninstaller, therefore it is up to the user to delete the old version of the workspace folder.