Development

Weekly Meetings

Oct 12, 2010

• Trac and Roadmap (Emanuele): Emanuele suggested we should create a development roadmap and make it a permanent item on the agenda. The idea is to go through the Trac tickets and use them to build the roadmap that would be made public.
  • go through trac and sort by priority
  • add other suggestions to roadmap as well
  • admins can add milestones via the admin tab
  • David will assign tasks on list; those assigned need to follow up and check and fix them

• Update on PythonSource error reporting and logging (Tommy)
  • Need to make sure that all messages are printed through debug.X, so that the debug level (verboseness in preferences) is correctly used
  • Can cut/copy/paste now
  • Can we prevent the delete from happening?
  • Phillip noted the spyder project has an interactive python console: http://packages.python.org/spyder/
  • Can press enter to get to the end
  • Need to check if this works or if we need to change
  • Now have ability to see stack trace from the GUI (triangle menu)
  • Suggest using a dialog to display trace when this item is selected instead of printing to console
  • Also saving stack trace to the execution log
  • Also printing debug information to vistrails log
  • Add trac item to fix prints to use debug
  • Try to fix core.debug to have gui.debug to eliminate Qt dependency

• Update on subworkflow (Daniel)
  • Notification when subworkflow is outdated triggered
  • new_abstraction signal from registry in addition to new_module signal so that we can check if we need subworkflows to update
  • How to display the possible upgrades (can be upgraded, can be upgraded but may break, etc.)

• New utility added by Carlos (currently at scripts/module_appearance) to draw fringes visually, which generates output that can be pasted directly into the add_module call.
  • Erik will test this on Mac and Windows.

• Preparing a "Get Started" tutorial for SIGMOD repeatability
  • Do we have instructions on how to use the latex package without crowdlabs?
    • links to actual workflows in latex
    • have README and example for latex in the source
  • Metadata associated with VisTrails: should we have the ability to add vistrail-level metadata? e.g., who created the vistrail, its purpose, etc.
    • have pointers to paper to workflow and vistrails
    • add pointers to papers
    • allow access to add/edit annotations at the vistrail level
    • add GUI element to allow people to edit/add annotations

• Maintaining VTK package
  • have four classes that don't wrap, have error even in python level
  • works well with VisTrails otherwise
  • haven't checked the new changes from the wrapping
  • Wendel will check on the new version

• Web services package:
  • Tommy investigate what a good web service library that can be integrated with VisTrails
  • Emanuele's pointers:
    • It is important to have in mind that we need to create Modules for methods and types on the fly. ZSI provided a way to generate class stubs for all methods and types in a wsdl file and VisTrails used those to create the Modules. I believe the other libraries can't do that so we might have to do that ourselves.
    • Potential library: SUDS (https://fedorahosted.org/suds/)
    • This page on stackoverflow can also be useful: What's the best SOAP client library for Python, and where is the documentation for it?
  • Here's how Taverna handles Web Services:
    • http://www.taverna.org.uk/introduction/services-in-taverna/

the model is that any "plain" SOAP service can be used immediately, given the URL of its WSDL specification, while some special collections like caGrid, Biomoby and other services need a Taverna plugin to be used, due to their specific requirements (regarding security, for example).

• • • They use Axis 1 to parse WSDLs and call web services, but built an overlay on top of Axis1 to do higher-level support, for instance caching of XSDs and header support.
    • REST support is currently under development with an alpha due out in September.

Oct 5, 2010

• Welcome Tommy!

• Update on subworkflow (Daniel)

• Issues raised by Matthias:

- need to automatically upgrade subworkflows. Currently it is necessary to manually upgrade a subworkflow whenever the version of one of the modules inside them changes.

- explorations do not detect an MplFigureCell embedded in a subworkflow.