AJAX based Workflow Editor

Google Summer of Code 2008 ideas

Primary mentor: Ian Dunlop (ianwdunlop at googlemail.com)
Secondary mentor: Stian Soiland-Reyes (soiland at gmail.com)

Background

The Taverna workbench (developed in the myGrid project) provides a framework for designing and executing workflows using distributed data resources and analysis tools. As well as the ability to access distributed resources, Taverna allows the automation of experiments. The workflow itself defines how and when during an experiment a service should be invoked and the workflow can iterate over multiple data objects, enabling repetitive tasks to proceed without the scientist's intervention. By combining services together in Taverna workflows, scientists can automatically access and analyse large amounts of data from a large number of distributed resources from their own desktops. Accessing these resources at their source means that individual scientists do not require local supercomputing power and do not have the overhead associated with the maintenance of data resources.

To date, Taverna can access over 3500 services from the Life Science domain and this number is continually growing. These services are a mixture of Web services, local java services, R statistical analysis scrips, BioMoby services and many more. The current workflow editor Java Swing based but an increasing number of users would like a browser based editor. Project Goals

Develop an AJAX based workflow editor that will:

• Allow the editing of Taverna workflows via a drag and drop interactive designer
• Plugin to the myExperiment framework for workflow upload/download
• Use the Taverna 2 codebase for workflow development
• Be compatible with the big 4 browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE & Opera)
• Be accessible over the web or deployed in a local web server

Project Requirements

To be able to do this project the student must be able to program in Java and Javascript and be familiar with AJAX techniques. Familiarity with Ruby and Rails would also be advantageous.

Contact us

If you want to contact us for a relaxed chat, you can use GTalk/Jabber to stian at soiland-reyes.com or iandunlop at googlemail.com - or you can join #taverna on IRC on irc.freenode.net