I had the opportunity to work on a number of workflows recently and had a
few suggestions for some ease-of-use improvements.
- It would help if the "Updates and Plugins" checks could be done in the
background and you should be able to select all of the plugins that you
want updated in one go, and then click update to queue them up.
- It would be very useful if there was a way to create REST service
templates. A template editor would let you create the URL template
(similar to the existing uniprot URL template), and register all of the
input and output ports and any ontology tags associated with the ports.
The editor would also let you register the service with biocatalogue.
- Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete shortcuts should work in the Services folder of
the Workflow explorer. Also if you copy a service, you can't paste it into
the Services folder you have to paste it into the workflow pane.
- Popup menus in the Workflow explorer have a tendency to extend behind
the dock on Mac OS X.
- "seperator" is misspelled in "Merge_String_List_to_a_String".
- I've always thought it odd that the icon for an input is a red
triangle whose apex points *out* of a workflow, and an input is a green
icon that points *into* a workflow. It seems counterintuitive.
- It would be easier if the fields that let you enter port ontology and
description were apparent when you created the port.
- It would be nice if there was a "cached" mode that lets you work with
cached responses from REST calls. This would be more server friendly when
users are designing their workflows. During the course of writing a
workflow you may hit a service multiple times with the same query, which is
annoying for a service provider to have to deal with, and may get you
blocked from using a service.
- A templating service (perhaps using velocity) would be useful to allow
people to export results from a workflow into a single report. It would be
nice if it were abstract enough so that other strategies could be plugged
in. A simple Velocity templating service might be a good start, but I can
also foresee wanting to use Word templating APIs like docx4j.
- A simple string template service would also be useful.
- It would be useful to be able to register individual beanshell scripts
with myExperiment. That would make it easier to use it as a component
repository.
- It would make Beanshell scripts more easily portable, if you could
simply register the dependencies as Gradle-like strings, and let Taverna
handle the caching, rather than have users manually install JARs into
folders. When a user runs someone else's script, it would download the
dependencies for them -- similar to the way that Groovy's @Grab annotation
works.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Mark Fortner
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