Figure 4

RESTful clients. RESTful clients can be implemented in most programming languages. Listed above are two examples in the Ruby and Perl programming languages. Both programs perform the same tasks: getting the 'comment' attribute for the cel-let-7 miRNA precursor and getting the mature miRNA sequences (hsa-miR-21 and hsa-miR-21*) for the hsa-mir-21 miRNA precursor. Both programs use standard libraries to issue HTTP GET requests and to parse the resulting XML documents. The final two examples demonstrate how miRMaid's FASTA sequence rendering capability can be used. We use the R statistical framework [21] and the 'curl' command-line program to issue a HTTP request to retrieve all C. elegans mature sequences in FASTA format.