If you want to create a plugin for Taverna 1.7.2, see the Developer Guide from the Taverna manual.
Prerequisites
To compile the plugins you will minimally need:
- Sun Java SDK 1.7
- Maven 3.0.5 or newer (3.2.5 or newer recommended)
For this tutorial we use the IDE Eclipse with the built-in Maven plugin (m2eclipse):
- Eclipse IDE for Java Developers Kepler SR2 or newer
See the general prerequisites page on how to install Eclipse and the required plugins. You should not need the Subversion support Subversive for these tutorials.
Typical Taverna plugin types
The Taverna workbench is composed by modules, and in general large areas of Taverna can be considered extension points. In fact most of the Taverna installation is implemented as plugins. This section will describe the most typical Taverna plugins that you might be interested to create. If you want to make another type of extension, or have other questions, feel free to ask on the taverna-hackers mailing lists.
Service invocation (activity)
Taverna can invoke different types of services, like WSDL-based web services, BioMart databases, BioMoby databases, SoapLab-generated web services, local scripts and nested workflows. Each of these service types have been implemented as service invocation implementations. If you want to invoke another type of service in Taverna, you can create your own service invocation types by implementing the net.sf.taverna.t2.workflowmodel.processor.activity.AsynchronousActivity
interface.
Service configuration and discovery (available services)
Service plugins also need to let the Taverna workbench be able to discover services, so that users can find the service and add it to the workflow. Additionally plugins may allow users to further configure a service. As service discovery is separate from service invocation, it is also possible to add third-party discovery plugins that find services of existing type, for instance a BioCatalogue plugin can discover WSDL services by using the BioCatalogue REST API.
More..
Tutorials not yet done:
- Other Extension points
- Perspectives
- Menu entries