Hi All, As we all know Airavata has its own workflow language call XWF. When XWF was introduced, main focus points are interoperability and convertibility. But with years of experience it is convinced that above requirements are not really useful when we come to real world use cases. And XWF is XML based bulky language where we attache WSDLs and Workflow image it self. But with the recent changes WSDL part is being removed from XWF.
It is worth to evaluate handy Scientific workflow languages in industry and find out pros and cons, at the end of this evaluation we need to come up with idea how we should improve Airavata workflow language, either we can improve existing XWF language, totally change to a new language available in industry or write a new light weight language. Basic requirements that we expect from new improvement are, high usability, flexible, light weight and real time monitoring support. As you can see above requirements are not direct comes with workflow languages but we need workflow language which help to support above requirements. After reading few papers and googling, initially i have come up with following three existing languages, 1. YAWL <http://www.yawlfoundation.org/> 2. WS-BPEL 3. SIDL <http://computation.llnl.gov/casc/components/index.html#page=home> In my opinion SIDL is more familiar with scientific domain, Radical-SAGA also uses slightly modified version of SIDL. Other than above three languages we can come up with simple workflow language base on json(or yaml) which support all our requirements for some extends. It would be grate if I can get more input regarding the $Subject form the airavata community. You all are more than welcome to provide any type of suggestions. Thanks, Shameera. -- Best Regards, Shameera Rathnayaka. email: shameera AT apache.org , shameerainfo AT gmail.com Blog : http://shameerarathnayaka.blogspot.com/
