Biologists produce large data sets and are in demand of rich and simple web portals in which they can upload and analyze their files. Providing such tools requires to mask the complexity induced by the needed High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The connection between interface and computing infrastructure is usually specific to each portal.
Introduction
Building rich web environments aimed at helping scientists analyze their data is a common trend in bioinformatics. These software packages offer the flexibility and power of a high-level programming language, but they do not provide a user interface, enable component and workflow definition. JFlow combines a user friendly interface with an intuitive python API.
Methods
Jflow user interface gathers five jQuery plug-ins providing user oriented views.
- availablewf lists all runnable workflows accessible to users,
- activewf monitors all started, completed, failed, aborted and reseted workflows,
- wfform presents workflow editable parameters in a form,
- wfoutputs displays all outputs produced by the workflow organized per component,
- wfstatus shows the workflow execution state as a list or an execution graph.
Jflow integration: ( a ) a piece of the NG6 HTML code source in which is positioned an empty div to build the activewf plug-in and a modal box for the wfstatus plug-in. ( b ) The jQuery code in charge to build Jflow plug-ins and manage user action. When the select.activewf event is thrown from activewf-div , a function is called with two parameters: event and workflow . The last parameter stores all the workflow’s information, such as its name and its id, used in this example to update the modal box title and to build the wfstatus plug-in. ( c ) The status of the illumina_qc workflow with the id 26 displayed as a graph in the NG6 application
