[kepler-dev] Installation ?

Kenneth Evans evans at aps.anl.gov
Thu Nov 8 12:01:09 PST 2007


Tim,

>> It would be great to be able to work with you.

Thanks.  I'm all for it.  The grant for Kepler / CORE looks like a really
good thing.  As a side effect, it should help me sell Kepler here.

        -Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy McPhillips [mailto:tmcphillips at mac.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 11:04 AM
To: Kenneth Evans
Cc: 'Kepler Developers'
Subject: Re: [kepler-dev] Installation ?

Hi Ken,

As Matt mentioned there are both short and long term plans to address  
Kepler deployment issues and to make it easier to develop, package,  
and share Kepler actors and extensions.  I've recently begun working  
full time on the new Kepler/CORE project (http://www.kepler- 
project.org/Wiki.jsp?page=KeplerCORE) which is currently in the  
project-planning stage, but will likely focus considerable effort on  
these areas. (Feel free to thumb through the proposal linked to the  
above web page to get an idea of what our plans were when we started  
writing the proposal almost a year ago).

It would be great to be able to work with you, both to make sure we  
capture the use cases and other requirements important to your  
community, and to get your ideas about how to address them.

I'm at UC Davis, now.  I left SSRL about three years ago so that I  
could focus my attention on scientific workflow stuff.  (I do miss  
the thrill of providing 24/7 software support, though ;-)

Cheers,

Tim

On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Kenneth Evans wrote:

> 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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