[kepler-dev] Installation ?

[Timothy McPhillips]

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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