Not sure how this came to be, but NCBI36 was incorrectly named GRCh36.
Changing this, however, breaks the sort order in assembly lists. So we
now sort on the UCSC alias (hg18).

Fixes #8

Fixes #9

Fixes #22

Fixes #30

See merge request !25

Don't fix what ain't broken. Unfortunately, string handling in Mutalyzer
really is broken. So we fix it.

Internally, all strings should be represented by unicode strings as much as
possible. The main exception are large reference sequence strings. These can
often better be BioPython sequence objects, since that is how we usually get
them in the first place.

These changes will hopefully make Mutalyzer more reliable in working with
incoming data. As a bonus, they're a first (small) step towards Python 3
compatibility [1].

Our strategy is as follows:

1. We use `from __future__ import unicode_literals` at the top of every file.
2. All incoming strings are decoded to unicode (if necessary) as soon as
   possible.
3. Outgoing strings are encoded to UTF8 (if necessary) as late as possible.
4. BioPython sequence objects can be based on byte strings as well as unicode
   strings.
5. In the database, everything is UTF8.
6. We worry about uploaded and downloaded reference files and batch jobs in a
   later commit.

Point 1 will ensure that all string literals in our source code will be
unicode strings [2].

As for point 4, sometimes this may even change under our eyes (e.g., calling
`.reverse_complement()` will change it to a byte string). We don't care as
long as they're BioPython objects, only when we get the sequence out we must
have it as unicode string. Their contents are always in the ASCII range
anyway.

Although `Bio.Seq.reverse_complement` works fine on Python byte strings (and
we used to rely on that), it crashes on a Python unicode string. So we take
care to only use it on BioPython sequence objects and wrote our own reverse
complement function for unicode strings (`mutalyzer.util.reverse_complement`).

As for point 5, SQLAlchemy already does a very good job at presenting decoding
from and encoding to UTF8 for us.

The Spyne documentation has the following to say about their `String` and
`Unicode` types [3]:

> There are two string types in Spyne: `spyne.model.primitive.Unicode` and
> `spyne.model.primitive.String` whose native types are `unicode` and `str`
> respectively.
>
> Unlike the Python `str`, the Spyne `String` is not for arbitrary byte
> streams. You should not use it unless you are absolutely, positively sure
> that you need to deal with text data with an unknown encoding. In all other
> cases, you should just use the `Unicode` type. They actually look the same
> from outside, this distinction is made just to properly deal with the quirks
> surrounding Python-2's `unicode` type.
>
> Remember that you have the `ByteArray` and `File` types at your disposal
> when you need to deal with arbitrary byte streams.
>
> The `String` type will be just an alias for `Unicode` once Spyne gets ported
> to Python 3. It might even be deprecated and removed in the future, so make
> sure you are using either `Unicode` or `ByteArray` in your interface
> definitions.

So let's not ignore that and never use `String` anymore in our webservice
interface.

For the command line interface it's a bit more complicated, since there seems
to be no reliable way to get the encoding of command line arguments. We use
`sys.stdin.encoding` as a best guess.

For us to interpret a sequence of bytes as text, it's key to be aware of their
encoding. Once decoded, a text string can be safely used without having to
worry about bytes. Without unicode we're nothing, and nothing will help
us. Maybe we're lying, then you better not stay. But we could be safer, just
for one day. Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh, just for one day.

[1] https://docs.python.org/2.7/howto/pyporting.html
[2] http://python-future.org/unicode_literals.html
[3] http://spyne.io/docs/2.10/manual/03_types.html#strings

This fixes Spyne to not crash on POST requests to the HTTP/RPC+JSON
webservice.

Note that all return values still use byte strings. Changing those will
touch a larger part of the codebase, and will be done in another commit.

As per [1]:

> Unlike the Python str, the Spyne String is not for arbitrary byte
> streams. You should not use it unless you are absolutely, positively
> sure that you need to deal with text data with an unknown encoding. In
> all other cases, you should just use the Unicode type. They actually
> look the same from outside, this distinction is made just to properly
> deal with the quirks surrounding Python-2’s unicode type.
>
> Remember that you have the ByteArray and File types at your disposal
> when you need to deal with arbitrary byte streams.
>
> The String type will be just an alias for Unicode once Spyne gets
> ported to Python 3. It might even be deprecated and removed in the
> future, so make sure you are using either Unicode or ByteArray in your
> interface definitions.

[1] http://spyne.io/docs/2.10/manual/03_types.html#strings

The `getGS` website view for LOVD2 would report "transcript not found" if
the genomic reference has multiple transcripts annotated or if the variant
description raises an error in the variant checker.

Fixes Trac#174

This prevents the case where the old announcement had a url set and the
new one does not (Redis would keep the existing url).

This fixes uploading base64 encoded data to the JSON webservice. For
example:

    echo "NM_003002.2:c.274delT\nXXX:g.1del" | base64 > test.base64
    curl \
      -d 'process=SyntaxChecker' \
      -d 'argument=hg19' \
      --data-urlencode 'data@test.base64' \
      'http://127.0.0.1:8082/submitBatchJob'

Upstream Spyne crashes on POST requests to the HTTP/RPC+JSON webservice.
We patched it in a rather hacky way.

This was a regression from the old codebase, where we installed Spyne
separately from our LUMC GitHub mirror. This is now also referenced in
the requirements.txt file.

Thanks to Ken Doig for reporting the issue.

Rename this webservice method. Note the capital letter L in the old
name. Also add a short note to the documentation that data arguments
must be base64 encoded.