Hi! My colleague Stuart Owen has been specifying how we can build a lightweight support for REST services in Taverna [1] . We've scheduled the first iteration of implementing this to be made available for Taverna 2.2 this spring.
As some of you know, you can access most REST services already using the 'Get page from URL' local worker, but this would mean half your workflow is spent constructing an URL. Also this worker can only use the HTTP GET method, and with no way to specify other parameters such as the 'Accepts' header. He has worked on this proposal together with several local users, and we had a meeting where we discussed this approach. There are of course plenty of more possibilities, but the goal of this planned work is to build something that should make it just a little bit easier to do REST services in Taverna. Part of the challenge is that most REST services are not formally described, even though there are several proposed standards for doing so (WADL, WSDL2). This solution will therefore require the user to specify URL pattern for the service themselves. However, we're also allowing for future linking with BioCatalogue, which can have richer descriptions of REST services. (See for example http://sandbox.biocatalogue.org/rest_methods/41 of such descriptions which we in the future could show from the 'Available services' panel, and show help about using the BioCatalogue plugin. ) One of the other challenges with REST support is how to deal with the output data, for instance using XPath for XML output, or a similar JSONPath for JSON output. Feel free to have a look at Stuart's specification [1] and provide us with any feedback. We're also interested in example services that you envision using from Taverna. [1] http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/developer/T2+REST+Support -- Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team School of Computer Science The University of Manchester ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ taverna-hackers mailing list [email protected] Web site: http://www.taverna.org.uk Mailing lists: http://www.taverna.org.uk/about/contact-us/ Developers Guide: http://www.taverna.org.uk/developers/
