Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Equipped with the plugins listed above, the jABC provides an intuitive
environment for workflow development that hardly requires any classical pro-
gramming skills. Workflow models are built graphically by constructing ser-
vice compositions (SLGs) that orchestrate basic services (in the form of SIBs)
along the flow of control. The atomic actions from which workflows are com-
posed are provided by the workflow building blocks, hence the potential for
the workflows is defined by the collection of available SIBs.
Technically, SIBs are Java classesthatare(atleast)markedwitha
@SIBClass
annotation in order to be recognized by the jABC framework.
Furthermore, a SIB class can contain definitions of parameters and labels for
the outgoing branches, as well as documentation text and specific icons for
the graphical representation. As indicated above, SIBs can furthermore imple-
ment the interfaces defined by jABC plugins to make use of their functionality.
Most importantly, the Tracer and Genesys interfaces, which define methods
for holding the execution code, are implemented by all service-providing SIBs.
For an elaborate introduction to the SIB concept and technical implementa-
tion details, the reader is referred to [306, 229].
The basic jABC distribution provides rich SIB collections for commonly
occurring tasks: SIBs that realize control-flow constructs like conditional
branching, loops, and parallelism, but also libraries for working with lists
and matrices and libraries for incorporating GUI elements. More precisely,
these so-called
Common-SIBs
comprise the following functionality that is
used within Bio-jETI:
•
Basic SIBs
for working with the execution context. For instance, this
library provides SIBs for putting objects into the execution context, for
accessing objects from the contexts, for evaluating conditions and for basic
operations on character sequences.
•
Collection SIBs
for dealing with arrays, collections and maps. In addition
to adding and removing objects from different kinds of collections, this
library offers, for instance, SIBs that iterate over a collection object or
perform specific operations like sorting a list.
•
GUI SIBs
for showing dialogs for user interaction. This library contains
common dialogs, such as for message display, file selection, and the input
of login data.
•
IO SIBs
for performing file-related tasks. The reading and writing of files
are probably the most important and most frequently used functions that
this library contains. However, also the other functionality it provides,
such as browsing directories, executing console commands and zipping
and un-zipping files are often useful.
Another set of standard SIBs in the scope of the Bio-jETI incarnation of the
jABC framework are the SIBs that are commonly used when working with
jETI services, which the jETI plugin provides:
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