[kepler-dev] Installation ?

[Kenneth Evans]

Tim,

Thanks for your response.  If you have worked in the x-ray community, then
you know there is a significant tendency for everybody to do things their
own way.  Consequently any system would need to be pretty flexible.  So we
would probably want to do all of: supply actors, customize, share, and allow
locally-developed actors in order to make people happy.

I have now successfully ZIP'ed my own setup and fixed up BAT and shell
commands to run it.  That wasn't so hard.  Most of it is done via existing
Ant targets.

I really do want to have the actors be outside the Kepler distribution and
outside .kepler.  This does not seem so easy to do at present, but I am
still experimenting.  I have only been using Kepler a short time.

I would like the actors to be more encapsulated.  Currently it seems the
Java files are one place, the necessary JARS are another, the images are
another, and the XML is somewhere else.  The KAR files would seem to remedy
this.  So far I have not got one to work, but that is a matter of time.  The
LSID scheme is part of the problem.  I especially don't like the part where
you have assign numbers rather than names in the LSID.  The more general
scheme, like eclipse plug-ins for example, probably needs a unique actor
name like org.myplace.mycategory. ... .MyActor and a version of the form
1.2.3.4.  Sooner or later I find you end up needing all that.

As I said, I still experimenting (and learning).  My understanding is
incomplete, so some of what I said may be wrong.

Are you still at SSRL or somewhere else?

        -Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy McPhillips [mailto:tmcphillips at mac.com] 
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 12:37 PM
To: Kenneth Evans, Jr.
Cc: 'Kepler Developers'
Subject: Re: [kepler-dev] Installation ?

Hi Ken,

There are a number of questions to think about when deciding how to  
distribute Kepler at APS.  (I worked in the macromolecular  
crystallography group at SSRL for seven years and visited APS a  
number of times.)

For example, who will be installing Kepler?  Your group?  Beam line  
support staff?  Visiting users?  Will the scientists and engineers  
supporting the beam lines need to develop new actors?  Will the APS  
users need to take the software home with them after they collect  
their data?  How many platforms do you need to support?  Will you be  
providing a single set of actors and workflows to all users, or do  
you need to customize the distribution for different users?  Will the  
beam line support folks customize the distribution further, share  
actors and workflows with each other, etc?

One simple approach for providing an identical distribution to all  
users is to simply tar or zip up a working installation, and provide  
instructions on where to unpack it on a target machine and how to set  
the required environment variables.  You can also provide a custom  
script for starting Kepler with class paths and so on set correctly.

One approach to extending Kepler that I have been playing around with  
allows me to work on a number of different extensions to Kepler (sets  
of workflows, actors and associated classes, and even trial  
replacements for Kepler classes) in version-controlled directories  
outside the Kepler distribution directory tree.  I added some custom  
ant targets to my local copy of build.xml that copy files from the  
extensions into the build directories after the standard sources are  
copied there, such that ant integrates my extensions into Kepler at  
build time.  This makes it easier to try my extensions with different  
versions of Kepler on multiple machines, although I haven't worked  
out all the bugs with this approach yet.

It's exciting to think about Kepler being used by the X-ray  
community!  (I remember seeing a demo of a scientific workflow for  
processing SAXS data, I think, at CHESS some years ago.)

Cheers,

Tim

On Nov 4, 2007, at 8:58 AM, Kenneth Evans, Jr. wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I now have a developer's version of Kepler installed in Eclipse and  
> pretty
> much working (for me).  If I want to give this installation to a  
> user, how
> would I go about doing it?
>
> We can assume the user would just want to run an executable to make
> workflows, not do things like Ant or create actors.  That seems to  
> be the
> primary intended use of Kepler.
>
> The beta3 downloadable version is pretty old, so the question is  
> perhaps how
> would I go about making a replacement of it with the current  
> version and
> with our stuff in it.  Perhaps there is an Ant target?
>
> Part of the reason is that if we are going to use Kepler, I need to  
> get
> buy-in from the users.  This would mean letting them try it  
> (without having
> the problems I have had ;-).
>
> I probably should say the anticipated use is for x-ray experiments  
> and data
> analysis at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National  
> Laboratory.  I am
> in charge of scientific software development there, but not a user  
> myself.
>
> This is also for me.  I would like to develop it in one place but  
> run and
> test it elsewhere, probably on another platform, and without Eclipse.
>
> Any other advice on how to present and promote Kepler to a set of  
> users
> would also be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
>         -Ken
>
>
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