The Bio-jETI Framework - User-Level Workflow Design: A Bioinformatics Perspective - page 38

Integration of services by means of jETI is convenient especially for tools
that work on files as input and output data and have proper command line
interfaces. This is, for instance, the case for many legacy applications, but
also for many script-controlled tools. As illustrated by Figure 2.5, in jETI, the
service provider maintains a jETI server that accesses (a collection of) tools
on the one side, and on the other side provides an interface to the network.
At runtime, the server receives service requests from a client (for instance, a
jABC SLG) and forwards them to the actual applications, then collects the
results and builds adequate response messages for the client. Conceptually
similar to the Web Services' WSDL descriptions [69], relevant request parame-
ters and the actual commands that are used by the server to execute the tools
are maintained in an XML file (named tools.xml ). This information is also
used by the jETI server to generate the corresponding SIBs automatically.
Fig. 2.6 jETI Tool Server Configuration Interface
Since the jETI server provides an HTML-based tool configuration inter-
face, it is not necessary to write the above-mentioned XML tool description
file manually. This makes tool integration easy: the jETI server deals with
most technical details, and the user only has to provide the information that
is essential for the tool invocation. This comprises at least the path to the
executable and required input and output parameters. Additionally, docu-
mentation texts and custom icons for the generated SIBs can be provided.
Figure 2.6 gives an impression of the tool configuration interface: The start
page (left) displays a list of all currently configured tools and provides links
to, for instance, tool editors, server logs, and the SIB download site. The right
side of the figure shows the definition of a mandatory input file parameter.