2016-
After a long period of successful use/maintenance of the code (in particular there has been the port to Qt5), the start of a number of mobility ion mass spectrometry projects in my lab has triggered the need for some new features in massXpert. I first started by writing the initial code of a totally independent new software (mobXpert), a software that is aimed at inspecting/mining mobility mass spectrometry data. But I soon realized that I was duplicating code from the massXpert project. I thus decided to refactor the whole massXpert software code tree so as to make code reuse a general rule.
Then, I wanted to explore the features of the QCustomPlot plotting library by Emanuel Eichhammer [http://qcustomplot.com/index.php/introduction]. I decided that I would design a mass spectrum viewer to match the features that are generally available in the various software offerings that come along with instruments. That was of interest to me because it provided a good test run for the library and also would finally allow me to get rid of the dependency on those software bits from the instrument vendors. This is how viewXpert was born, that actually integrates some nifty peak analysis recording features.
When the viewXpert project had reached a good feature level, I started again working on mobXpert, by using the classes/features previously coded into viewXpert.
Finally, I decided that all three software pieces would be bundled into a single software package called msXpertSuite.
2000-2015
Continuous code maintenance/improvements were done on the code during all these years. In 2015, the massXpert program was considered feature-full and stable. In fact, in 2009, the features that were coded in the software were considered mature and original enough to warrant an article:
Rusconi, F. massXpert 2: a cross-platform software environment for polymer chemistry modelling and simulation/analysis of mass spectrometric data. Bioinformatics 2009, 117e56:2741-2742, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp504 [1].
1998-2000
The name massXpert comes from a project I started while I was a post-doctoral fellow of the Ecole Polytechnique at the Institut Européen de Chimie et Biologie, Pessac (Bordeaux), France.
The massXpert program was published:
Rusconi, F. and Belghazi, M. Desktop prediction/analysis of mass spectrometric data in proteomic projects by using massXpert. Bioinformatics 2002 18(4):644-5) [2].
At that time, MS-Windows was at the Windows NT 4.0 version and the next big release was going to be "you'll see what you'll see" : MS-Windows 2000.
When I tried massXpert on that new version(one colleague had it with a new machine), I discovered that my software would not run normally(the editor was broken). The Microsofties would advise to "buy a new version of the compiler environment and rebuild". I did not want to continue paying only for using something I had produced. I put myself in quest of Free Software [http://www.gnu.org/] (that I had heard and read about during years, without ever daring trying it).
2001-2006
I decided during fall 1999 that I would stop using Microsoft products for my development. At the beginning of 2000 I started as a CNRS research staff in a new laboratory and decided to start fresh: I switched to GNU/Linux (I never looked back). After some months of learning, I felt mature to start a new development project that would eventually become an official GNU package: GNU polyxmass.
The GNU polyxmass software, much more powerful than massXpert was, was published:
Rusconi, F., GNU polyxmass: a software framework for mass spectrometric simulations of linear(bio-)polymeric analytes. BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:226; published 27 April 2006 [3].
Following that publication I got a lot of feedback(very positive, in a way) along the lines: "Hey, your software looks very interesting; it's only a pity we cannot use it because it runs on GNU/Linux, and we only use MS-Windows and MacOSX!".
I decided to make a full rewrite of GNU polyxmass and the software that you are running now is the product of that rewrite. I decided to "recycle" the massXpert name because this soft is written in C++, as was its ancestor. Also, because the first MS-Windows-based massXpert project is not developed anymore, taking that name was kind of a "revival" which I enjoyed. However, the toolkit I used this time is not the Microsoft Foundation Classes(first massXpert version) but the Trolltech Qt framework(this software, see the "About Qt" help menu).
Coding with Qt has one big advantage: it allows the developer to code once and to compile on the three main platforms available today: GNU/Linux, MacOSX, MS-Windows. Another advantage is that Qt is wonderful software(Free Software).
Enjoy msXpertSuite !
Filippo Rusconi,
author of msXpertSuite