[myexperiment-hackers] Re: myExperiment + RapidMiner

[Simon Fischer]

Jiten Bhagat wrote:
> [cc'ing the myExperiment dev list]
>
> Hi Simon,
>
> Packaging this as a zip has benefits beyond myExperiment:
> - it's easily extensible for future needs - you can add new things
> beyond the workflow definition.
> - it's highly portable.
> - you can embed custom things in there - like custom components etc.
> used by the users. Thereby ensuring that workflows can be run by anyone
> (though this is a bigger engineering/design issue for you :-)).

Well, this is actually a very small issue.

[...]

> > However, as I understand it, when I upload a zip to workflow.xml, I
> > will also receive this zip file when I download it again, which is not
> > what I want, of course. As long as this behaviour can be avoided, I
> > can also make a zip file. 
>
> The current behaviour is that whatever has been uploaded will be
> downloadable. So if your requirement above is crucial then we shouldn't
> package your workflows as zips.

Well, it's not crucial, but I think downloading a zip and then throwing 
away a PNG, an SVG, a description, and some more meta data, and keeping 
only a small XML file making about 10% of the file size is not a 
particularly elegant design, is it? :-)

> In that case, how about:
> - We stick to uploading of the XML workflow definition via the API (as
> you have already done).
> - You send me a few examples of workflows, and a mockup of how you want
> the "run" and "workflow components" sections to look like, so I can
> build a processor and views. In the "Run" section it would be useful to
> have links to how someone might run the workflow (eg: "download the
> RapidMiner workbench from...").

Ok, I will do that in a separate mail.

Best,
Simon