[MOBY-l] Moby in workflows

[Tom Oinn]

Simon Twigger wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> I havent used Taverna but have heard about it on the list and from 
> Martin. We arent using Taverna at this point but I think this type of 
> workflow tool is wonderful and will be a great help to people trying to 
> chain services together. I gave Taverna a try for the first time this 
> afternoon and had some issues on Mac OSX, I submitted a bug report on 
> sourceforge. Consequently, I havent had a chance to really play with it 
> so my thoughts so far are limited to rather superficial observations.
> 
> I agree with Rebecca's point that a non-gui implementation would be 
> great so that we can design workflows in Taverna but then pipe things 
> into them behind the scenes. I'd love to be able to create a custom 
> workflow in Taverna and then wrap it up as a 'component' or other black 
> box and then be able to pipe input data to it from Java (perl?) and have 
> the output come back such that I could use it appropriately. This would 
> be a great way to quickly create code to solve complex problems.

Hi Simon, Rebecca et al,

We always intended Taverna to be heavily modular in structure - there's 
a clean seperation between the ui, the underlying data models and the 
enactor itself so although we don't currently have a command line 
version it would be trivial to write. To call the enactor from Java is 
probably about five to ten lines of code - PERL would be slightly harder 
as we wrap the data objects up in an XML format which you'd then have to 
deserialize (the Java API does this for you) but it's all documented; 
obviously anyone writing a PERL API for Taverna would have our full 
support :)

We're currently working on a much more sophisticated drag and drop style 
workflow diagram, but it's a surprisingly hard thing to get right. We're 
in the planning stages at the moment but it will exist in the future.

The idea of an interface which you could just drop files into is a good 
one, and should be relatively easy to do. I guess something which showed 
a panel with the description of the workflow and a 'drop here' for each 
input? The user could then drag files from the file system (or URLs from 
the browser) onto the targets and hit the 'go' button, presumably we 
could also then have drag sources corresponding to the outputs which the 
user could drag out to get the results. Could be a neat 'mini 
interface', I'll see if anyone wants to code it.

The explorer bug is OSX only, so might take us some time to fix (we 
don't have any apple machines) but we'll investigate and see, often this 
means shouting at apple :)

All these suggestions have been great, I'm cc'ing this mail to the 
taverna-users list but is there any chance you guys could join? You've 
obviously got some excellent ideas and I'm sure others would like to 
hear them.

Cheers,

Tom