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Downloads highlight Taverna’s popularity

The suite of new features available with the latest release of Taverna – version 2.1 – have proven very popular. Just two months after its release in December 2009, it has chalked up over 1300 downloads.

Taverna 2.1 has an improved user interface that makes the writing, editing and running of workflows easier. It includes a drag-and-drop, graphical workflow editor, and keyboard shortcuts that make common tasks quick to perform. Services can now be copied within, or between, workflows, which prevents the need to re-specify service configurations, such as a BioMart query or Beanshell script.

When running a workflow, the user can decide whether to record the values passed between services (which is very useful for debugging workflows), and whether he or she wishes to use a database to allow the use of large data sets.

Securing access to Web Services and data is vital for many of the domains in which Taverna is being applied. Taverna 2.1 includes support for the calling of secured Web Services, and also includes a Credential Manager and security infrastructure than can be extended for specific purposes.

The new Workflow Workbench currently supports access to secure Web Services that use HTTPS and/or WS-Security with username and password authentication. It will also allow WS-Security timestamps to be added to messages sent to, and from, Web Services. This helps services fight replay attacks. Even if your messages are somehow intercepted, this prevents them from being re-used to trick the service.

Taverna 2.1 also includes a myExperiment perspective. This allows a user to browse and search for the hundreds of workflows available on the myExperiment website.

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Learn about software on YouTube

The new OMII-UK YouTube channel lets you view the latest software demonstrations and videos from our staff and collaborators.

We'll be adding to the channel over the coming months. It currently contains software demonstrations of Campus Grid Toolkit, middleware interoperation, OSCAR, Rapid and the JSDL Applications Repository. And it's not all demonstrations! We also have videos showing the sustainability lecture recently presented at NeSc in Edinburgh by Neil Chue Hong (OMII-UK's Director) and interviews with OMII-UK's PIs and some of our partners.

All of the YouTube videos can also be viewed on the OMII-UK website.

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Rapid is textbook software

A collaboration between Rapid and chemists at the University of Edinburgh has led to Rapid’s inclusion in the most widely used textbook for teaching undergraduates about inorganic chemistry.

Rapid allows fast development and low-cost maintenance of custom web portals for scientific computing. It has been used at the University of Edinburgh to provide chemists with easy access to the computational applications they need for their studies (see June 2009 Newsletter).

The textbook Molecular Orbital Calculations of Inorganic Compounds is available from Wiley-VCH.

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