Happy Christmas from the myGrid team, who are pleased to announce the release of version 1.5.0 of the Open Source Taverna bioinformatics workflow toolkit [1]. This is now available for download on the Sourceforge site and includes some substantial changes to version 1.4.
Taverna 1.5.0 is a small download, but when first run it will then download and install the required packages which can take some time on slow networks. In the near future there will be a mechanism for downloading a bundle of core packages. There are some significant changes in the underlying architecture of Taverna and how it handles core packages and optional plugins, using a system called Raven, see release notes below.
The documentation is currently being updated and the user documentation should be complete very soon, with the technical documentation following shortly afterwards. The reason for this is to allow the software to be released with some time to spare before the Christmas holidays.
Release notes:
There have been a number of substantial changes in the underlying architecture of Taverna since the previous release. These include:
- An overhaul of the User Interface (UI), replacing the unpopular Multiple Document Interface with a cleaner and simpler single document UI which can be customised using Perspectives. There are built in perspectives to allow the design and enactment of workflows, and plugins can integrate with the UI by providing perspectives of their own. Together with this, users are able to create their own layouts built from individual components.
- Taverna now allows for multiple workflows to be open and enacted at the same time.
- Support for the new BioMart data management system version 0.5, together with backward compatibility for old workflows that used Biomart 0.4.
- Better provenance generation and browsing support, through a plugin now known as LogBook.
- Better support for semantic service discovery through the Feta plugin [2].
- Modulularisation of the Taverna code base.
- Development and integration of an underlying architecture know as Raven. This allows for Apache Maven like declaration of dependencies which are discovered and incorporated into the Taverna system at runtime. Together with the modularisation of the Taverna code base, Raven gives the benefit that updates can be provided dynamically and incrementally, without the need for monolithic releases as in the past. This allows the provision of updates to bugs, and new features, within a very short timescale if necessary. It also provides plugin developers with a greater degree of autonomy and independance from the core Taverna code base.
- Improved and more advanced plugin management with the ability to provide immediate updates, and for plugin providers to publish their plugins via xml descriptions.
- Numerous bug-fixes including the removal of a number of memory leaks.
JIRA generated release notes and bug status reports can be found here and here
O'Really? 