Compi: a framework for portable and reproducible pipelines

Compi is an application framework to develop end-user, pipeline-based applications with a primary emphasis on: (i) user interface generation, by automatically generating a command-line interface based on the pipeline specific parameter definitions; (ii) application packaging, with compi-dk, which is a version-control-friendly tool to package the pipeline application and its dependencies into a Docker image; and (iii) application distribution provided through a public repository of Compi pipelines, named Compi Hub, which allows users to discover, browse and reuse them easily. By addressing these three aspects, Compi goes beyond traditional workflow engines, having been specially designed for researchers who want to take advantage of common workflow engine features (such as automatic job scheduling or logging, among others) while keeping the simplicity and readability of shell scripts without the need to learn a new programming language. Here we discuss the design of various pipelines developed with Compi to describe its main functionalities, as well as to highlight the similarities and differences with similar tools that are available. An open-source distribution under the Apache 2.0 License is available from GitHub (available at https://github.com/sing-group/compi). Documentation and installers are available from https://www.sing-group.org/compi. A specific repository for Compi pipelines is available from Compi Hub (available at https://www.sing-group.org/compihub.

An analysis of user-interface creation complexity using a model-driven design approach

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a software development approach that facilitates problem comprehension. MDD is carried out based on level of abstraction attained by working with models. When using models to create user-interfaces, development time can be reduced significantly. However, automatic user-interface generation is done with preestablished templates that might not fulfill all the requirements clients. These templates might also be too general and sometimes provide few customization options. In this paper, we review research on the usage of MDD for user-interface development. We also study how automatic user-interface generation can result in limitations as the need might arise for repeatedly modifying model and code.

A service-oriented application creation process in ubiquitous environments

Purpose Many features constitute an adaptive system such as user model, interface specification, business functionalities and service implementation. Context awareness is an important facet of service oriented application creation dealing with the gathering, use and representation of context information. Generally, user interfaces and services communities work separately on the adaptation process and do not converge. The aim of this work is to manage the system’s functionalities and the user interface that delivers data to the relevant consumer early since the design phase until the code generation. Design/methodology/approach The authors discuss how a unified method based on a model-driven architecture for adaptive user interface and pervasive service creation eases the work of designers and developers, limits incompatibility issues and supports dynamic generation of systems adapted to different contexts of use. Findings The proposed approach is able to support a semi-automatic ubiquitous application generation with service, behavior, presentation and content adaptation. Originality/value In this paper, the authors tackle context-awareness at two levels: system functionalities and user interface generation. The authors also tackle adaptation at the specification and implementation levels.