Taverna 1.7.1 released
Taverna 1.7.1 was released today, including an updated preview of t2, the enactor of Taverna 2.0 scheduled for June 2008.
You can download 1.7.1 from SourceForge.
This update to Taverna resolves a number of issues with Taverna and the preview of the new t2 enactor.
For instance, you should now be able to run a workflow in the Taverna 2 preview perspective and see the progress graphically with progress bars. If you run a sufficiently advanced workflow, such as one of Paul Fisher’s workflows- you should be able to see the streaming of t2 in effect, where a processor downstream will start iterating over the results even if the one above has not yet finished. This alone should be able to give a nice speed-up to workflows iterating over many items.
We’ve also reintroduced the interactive diagram editor to complement the normal, static diagram. Now, we know it’s still not 100% stable, so that’s why there is that little “experimental” there in the title, but many users find this much easier to work with. You can simply click on a processor in the diagram to select it, right click, select Connect output and draw a line to the processor you want to connect. You can even make connections the other way around, if you know you need an input, but don’t remember quite sure from where! You should also be able to drag services from Available services and onto this diagram to add them to the workflow.
Although this won’t be the editor you will see in Taverna 2.0 that we have scheduled for end of June 2008, but we’re aiming for a similar way to edit workflows, as one of many, as we’ll shine up the graphical user interface to go better with the new enactor. We’ll also now be working on security aspects, such as support for various grid systems, as you might have seen discussed on taverna-hackers.
If you’ve been using nested workflows and have had complains from your friends on myExperiment because their Taverna can’t find F:\workflows\nested\mynestedworkflow.xml - 1.7.1 has a solution for you. When you save a workflow, tick the Embed nested workflows checkbox, and all of your nested workflows will be embedded in the saved Scufl instead of referenced by filename.
Note that if you actually find the referenced nested workflows useful, say because you update the nested workflow on disk and want the new version to be used in all the workflows including that nested workflows, make sure you save the workflow without the checkbox ticked to keep the references. We’ll be looking at further improving the GUI so that it’s more obvious when a nested workflow is included by reference (ie. filename) or embedded - but expect this to look slightly different for Taverna 2.0 anyway.
The t2 plugin is now able to render results such as images and JMol data as in Taverna 1. Note that we’re still working on improving the user experience in the t2 result browser, as it’s still not optimal. For instance you currently need to expand the data document, select the first entry, right click and select Render as image.
Under the official plugin list we’ve included the GT4 processor and scavenger contributed by Wei Tan and Ravi Madduri of the caGrid project, note that this is still in it’s early stages as we’re sorting out issues to do with WSRF, security, etc. in tight cooperation with caGrid.
If you’re missing the alternative way to find services of Taverna 2 Activity Palette that was introduced in 1.7.0, you can also find this under available plugins, we chose to no longer include this by default as Taverna 2.0 will include a different activity palette and it would not be a realistic preview.
The source code download of 1.7.1 should also be more complete including the code for the plugins and the t2 preview - although we still recommend doing an anonymous CVS checkout.
We’ve resolved these issues according to Jira:
Well, that’s about what I remember for now, let’s hope you’ll enjoy the release, and as always, report any bugs, issues and questions to our mailing lists.
Any chance of some video walk throughs showing how to set up simple bioinformatics workflows in Taverna 1.7.1?