Hi,

We are a group of bioinformaticians 
at the Institute for Plant Biochemistry in Halle/Germany.

We have created a small set of Mass Spectrometry 
and Metabolomics related BioMoby services and Workflows, 
some of the early ones can be found at
http://www.myexperiment.org/users/937/workflows

However, we don't dare to teach our Biologists next door
how to use the Taverna workbench, because simply 
for execution of workflows it is a bit overkill.

Hence we started creating a Web based "player"
for pre-canned workflows. A technical pre-preview 
is available at http://msbi.ipb-halle.de/MetFlow/.
This one tries to obtain information on a metabolite 
measured as Tandem-MS peak list.

At the top-left you find the main input field, in out case a peak list,
and some additional (secondary in BioMoby speak) parameters a bit
further down.

Just hit the "Run Workflow" button, and see our servers 
go up in smoke ;-). Honestly, there was no stress tests 
and no layout optimisation efforts so far. This workflow 
incorporates some external webservices, so if something 
is going wrong there, you will experience a timeout 
after five minutes.

Once finished, three lists for the outputs of the workflow
will appear, which carry further information 
from Pubchem, www.chemspider.com or the KEGG pathways.
The larg-ish text field and graphics open in separate windows.

We'd be interested in putting the code up,
so that others can join the development 
of this as a platform, possibly integrated 
into the Taverna project next to the Workbench.

I can envision two use cases for this platform:

1) As a "cheap" web based enactor, no local software needed, 
   and the interface is automagically created from the 
   description. This is what we currently have in place.

2) As a "JSF tag library". A tag library in JSF world is 
   a set of related visual (and invisible) components 
   you could think of Buttons, Tree-views or Calendars 
   in "normal" web applications and for Taverna 
   workflow outputs renderers such as DNA-prettyprinters,
   ZoomablePathwayViewers, MoleculeVievers etc.

   This allows to hand-craft (sets of) web pages using 
   these components to create rich web applications 
   with (one or more) Taverna workflows used 
   for the Business Logic (or Bio Logic ;-)

Technically we use Tom Oins platform code,
and call that from JavaServerFaces (JSF) pages
on a Tomcat server. The interface is done using 
the JBoss RichFaces JSF library, which has some 
cool Ajax features included.

Are there any comparable efforts out there ?
Anybody interested in joining in ?

Yours,
Steffen

-- 
IPB Halle                    AG Massenspektrometrie & Bioinformatik
Dr. Steffen Neumann          http://www.IPB-Halle.DE
Weinberg 3                   http://msbi.bic-gh.de
06120 Halle                  Tel. +49 (0) 345 5582 - 1470
                                  +49 (0) 345 5582 - 0
sneumann(at)IPB-Halle.DE     Fax. +49 (0) 345 5582 - 1409


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