Hello all, had a conversation with Carole here in Hannover yesterday. I had some suggestions for future improvements to Taverna and she said I should post these to the list:
1. Internal parallelisation of workflows. The ability to specify that a particular subsection within a workflow should implicitly divide the input, run several instances in parallel on some kind of back-end grid (LSF, SGE, Condor, or an EC2 approach, etc.), and recombine the output. A subsection could just be one component, or several chained together, or the entire workflow. The current strategy as per App4Andy I believe is just the last one of the three - i.e. the entire workflow. 2. Simplified plugin APIs to make it quicker and easier for Taverna plugin novices to understand what they're meant to be doing. This has definitely improved recently in terms of documentation, but still some way to go in terms of the API itself. 3. Reporting functionality. The ability to dynamically generate PDFs or spreadsheets or Word docs etc. based on workflow output via some kind of graphic designer for report templates is really valuable. Knime and Pipeline Pilot both have this feature. 4. The GUI still needs a lot of work but I think you're onto that already. Knime's equivalent design tool is very good indeed. 5. Still need a better way of delegating security credentials to the server/grid instances so the workflow can log into things on your behalf. 6. The killer feature would be the ability to install a plugin on your desktop or grid front-end client and have it propagate to the back-end server or multiple grid instances along with the workflow, in the case that it hasn't already been installed back there. You'd need to think of some way of sandboxing the plugins distributed in this way so that they can only affect the workflows of the user that submitted them. 7. Have the ability (maybe via myExperiment) to log every execution of a workflow including a reference to the input data, the structure of the workflow at the time of the execution, and a reference to the results, provenance, etc. This is very useful for lab notebook concepts and also for reproducing work at a later date. 8. Taverna server (App4Andy is a great start by the way) to offer the possibility to upload arbitrary workflows via the desktop client and execute them on the server/grid/cloud, rather than choosing from a predefined selection. On uploading it could make an auto-generated but editable web interface for obtaining workflow input, monitoring progress, downloading results/provenance/etc. The workflow could be a one-off, or could be stored there, and kept private, or shared via user/group notions, etc. This is all in Knime already (except the cloud bit). Hope this is helpful. cheers, Richard -- Richard Holland, BSc MBCS Operations and Delivery Director, Eagle Genomics Ltd T: +44 (0)1223 654481 ext 3 | E: [email protected] http://www.eaglegenomics.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb _______________________________________________ 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/
