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?

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.

Thanks

Mark Johnson
Staff Scientist, NCBI
mjohnson@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov