[myexperiment-hackers] Re: myExperiment + RapidMiner

[Jiten Bhagat]

> 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? :-) 

Depends. I wouldn't expect the user to have to strip individual things
out of the package to use them. I would expect an application to be able
to read the package and intelligently figure out what to do with the
contents. This is how Office 2007 and OpenOffice work. Besides, I
suspect most users wouldn't want to throw away any images and metadata
that come with the XML file as I expect these would be useful in
understanding how they might go about using that workflow.

In terms of file size - it's a zip file, so it's compressed. And zip
technology is now fairly ubiquitous. Even if it was just a single
workflow in a zip file that would usually be a large saving in disk space.

I do understand that this requires more work on the part of the
application developers to support this.

Jits


Simon Fischer wrote:
> 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