[Pipet Users] Piper startup logging...

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> Believe it or not, there are all expected -- at least, I get most of them
> :-). Piper is still under heavy development, so some of this is
> debugging output and some of this is errors that haven't been fixed
> yet.

That's right, you'll get a lot of messages, but nearly all will be for
debugging.  On the Pied/Piper GUI end, every time you do something, you get
some sort of feedback.  When I feel that most of my bugs are gone, and most of
my features are added, Pied/Piper will be silent.

> I think you're doing really well. Happy to hear you are trying it out!

And we need some more people to try it out!!! :-)

Karl-Max Wagner wrote:
> 
> Sorry if I sound stupid: but some instructions in how to use
> this toy would be welcome ;-).

Jean-Marc, Jarl, and I do need to write something soon.  My question for Jarl
is if there is a simple demo of the BL communicating across a network.  Give
me some basic instructions, and I can spiffy it up a bit.

> And here already the big question: FreeSpeech / Overflow has a
> GUI and Piper has one.

Right.

> I guess that the FreeSpeech / Overflow
> GUI is gonna be scrapped sometime in the future, right ?

That is our intention :-)  Brad and I want to make Pied/Piper nice enough so
that Jean-Marc will prefer it to his own GUI.

> So it
> would be a bad idea to look into the interfaces to the
> components, I guess - I'd better stick to piper. Is there
> already something like an interface description to hook my stuff
> in ?

It wouldn't be a bad idea to look into Overflow's component UI's, because
Pied/Piper actually uses the same UI libraries and generates the same (almost)
XML network descriptions.

As for hooking a program to Piper, it would be done through Overflow, the PL
(although it can be done through GMS, the BL, but we're going to try and use
Overflow as the interface).

Overflow can do command-line generation and connect us to proggies that way. 
You can also make C++ components to be used directly in Overflow.  Jean-Marc,
do you have any instructions for Karl-Max on how to do this?

The other way to "add a UI to Piper" would be to create a separate one
altogether.  UI's in the UIL communicate with the rest of Piper via CORBA. 
So, it is possible to bypass Pied/Piper altogether.

This is basically how communication works:

    [UIL --> DL] --> [BL --> PL]
     Build-Time        Run-Time

> My intention is to use the application interface ( or whatever
> it is called ) in order to be piper compatible. Is that already
> sort of fixed or - due to development - sort of a moving target
> ?

It should be open for changes still, since we WANT to interface Piper with
other programs.  That's sort of the whole purpose to Piper ;-)  It probably is
more a moving target than anything, but collaborations with other projects
will help us to nail it down a bit better.

I'd like some comments from Jean-Marc on this, please.

What I would personally prefer is a way to interface programs with Piper using
Pied/Piper alone.  IOW, use "connect the dots" to build your interface, rather
than program and compile.  The best way to do this, though, would be to have a
collection of very small components for the API.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                                           jeff at bioinformatics.org
Director, Bioinformatics.org: The Open Lab     http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
"All those scientists--they're all alike!  They say they're working for us,
but what they really want is to rule the world!" 
  -- Angry Villager, Young Frankenstein
--