On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Mark Johnson <mjohnson@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov> wrote:
I'm writing some tools to integrate NCBI data resources with Galaxy. I have two questions.
The first is simple. I want to write a tool for a long-running process that is handled by some other scheduler, and that produces its own job ids. Some web services, like BLAST, for example, receive a request, and take a while to complete processing. The job id can be used to fetch either job status or results from the server, depending on whether it has completed. How do you make a Galaxy tool that polls the server, and produces an output set only when the process is complete?
Why do you need to do anything special at all for Galaxy here? I'd just write it as a single command line call which blocks. As far as Galaxy will know it is just a slow tool.
The second question is, besides this mailing list, and the Galaxy wiki, is there are good online video or text resource that explains the Galaxy architecture and how to use it? The docs are good as far as they go, but most of what's in the <command> scripts in the tool files isn't documented.
There are quite a few Galaxy videos... not sure if there are any aimed at potential developers. Are you asking about the Cheetah template language used inside the XML for the <command> which is almost a scripting language in itself, or the actual wrapper scripts used in some tools (which can be written in Python, Perl, etc)? Peter