[Swift-devel] Swift configuration interface

[Michael Wilde]

David, Wenjun, and Tom, I wanted to introduce you all and start a discussion of the Swift configuration interface.

Wenjun and Tom, can you prepare a web page or PPT (on the SWFT wiki if no better place is apparent) that introduces your general science gateway, maybe shows a set of screenshots, and  tells a user how to try it?

Regarding the Swift configuration interface, specifically:

- can you suggest to David a pallet of tools (web server, interface builder, etc) that you think might be both productive and compatible with your portal? (At least in the sense of minimizing the number of new technologies that we jointly require).

- Mark Hereld raised a good point when I explained that the complexity of a command line interface was driving us to a web interface. He suggested the the "svn like" approach of a set of subcommands that maintain a database might help reduce that complexity, so that no single command needed was very complex, but together, the commands enabled you to do everything needed.

*One* example of this might be to maintain for each user a small SQLite database of config information, along with perhaps a global one (part of the release, or fetched via the web), from which purpose-built sites and tc files were generated.

Then users could say things like:

  swift cf add PADS Fusion
  swift cf apps blast dock convert
  swift cf set throttle 200
  swift run myscript.swift

Perhaps another thought to pursue. This would be similar, David, to the command syntax you proposed, with the key aspect being that it is stateful and can generate a variety of configs.

Both routes (web and cmd line) have merits, but perhaps this again lets us defer the web a bit, and also helps us better model the underlying model behind both.

- Mike



-- 
Michael Wilde
Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory