The Bio-jETI Framework - User-Level Workflow Design: A Bioinformatics Perspective - page 31

accompanied by the continuous evaluation of workflow-level constraints,
alerting the workflow designer when constraints are violated.

•

Constraint-driven workflow design is enabled by the functionality for
synthesis-based loose programming by which the framework has been ex-
tended in the scope of this work: the application of constraints is fur-
thered, systematically using them for high-level descriptions of individual
components and entire workflows, which can then be translated automat-
ically into concrete workflows that conform to the constraints by design.
This allows users to describe the intended workflow at an abstract, less
technical level by providing simple means for sketching workflow “skele-
tons” and for expressing workflow constraints in terms of domain-specific
vocabularies.

In Section 2.1, this chapter introduces the basic jABC framework and the
plugins that are commonly applied when using the framework for model-
driven, service-oriented workflow development. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 then
focus on the constraint-guarded and constraint-driven workflow design
methodology, respectively.

2.1 Model-Driven, Service-Oriented Workflow
Development

Bio-jETI builds upon a multi-purpose domain-independent modeling frame-
work, the Java Application Building Center ( jABC ) [306, 229], for the work-
flow definition and management, and the Java Electronic Tool Integration
framework ( jETI ) [301, 202] for dealing with the integration and execu-
tion of remote services. Both are based on well-established software tech-
nology and have been applied successfully to different application domains
(cf., e.g. [141, 162, 160, 161, 34, 220, 142]). The following Sections 2.1.1 and
2.1.2 describe the jABC framework and the jETI technology, respectively, in
greater detail.

2.1.1 The jABC Framework

Generally speaking, the jABC is a multi-purpose, domain-independent mod-
eling framework. In particular, it has been applied as a comprehensive service
engineering environment [206, 197, 210] following the eXtreme Model-Driven
Design (XMDD) [208, 209, 157] and Continuous Model-Driven Engineering
(CMDE) [210] paradigms. XMDD and CMDE put the (user-level) models
into the main focus of software development, technically building upon a
combination of extreme programming [39], model-driven design, and process
modeling methodologies.
In its simplest form, the jABC is basically a graphical editor for construct-
ing directed, hierarchical graphs by placing nodes (called Service Independent