Figure 1

Variant Tool Chest (VTC) was built to be extensible. Each new tool only needs to interface with a few simple classes and is otherwise completely independent. All tools should be self-contained within a single parent Java package. The main driver class for VTC is VTCEngine. Any new tool should have its own Engine class and be instantiated from VTCEngine. All generally applicable data structures such as VariantPool and SamplePool are placed within the vtc.datastructure Java package. Any new generally applicable data structures should also be placed in vtc.datastructure. Otherwise the data structure should be housed within the tool's package. Likewise, any generally applicable methods should be placed in the UtilityBelt class.