[Pipet Devel] Loci as a locus

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Wise and mighty Locians,

I haven't mentioned this before, but the thought came a while back about
embedding a copy of Loci within Loci so that it runs as a locus.

Where did this idea come from?  Well, I was thinking about what would happen
if you made a Workflow Diagram or graphical script where some outputs were
left unspecified (little dots not connected).  Loci should then send the
outputs to stdout, right?  Then I realized the same would apply to unspecified
inputs: They should come from stdin.  Or maybe, since we could have multiple
connectors unconnected, you could specify on THE COMMAND-LINE, what to do with
them:

    $ loci -i1 <input1> -i2 <input2> -o1 <output1>

So, hmmm, if Loci can run like this from the command-line, maybe Loci too can
be wrapped to run inside of Loci!

What's the use of this?  I'm thinking along the line of a composite locus. 
Since you can put parts of a WFD/script inside of composite locus (note that a
composite locus differs from a container locus in that with the former, the
connections/workflow are preserved), you should be able to view them (in a
windowlet) as being in their own Workspace.  And, if you look at the
unconnected dots/lines (connectors) on the composite's Workspace, they should
match the dots/lines on the composite's icon.  (We'll probably then need a way
to dynamically add and remove dots/lines (connectors) from an icon (locus).

This also gives Loci a 'workspace in a workspace' functionality like that of
AVS:

    http://www.avs.com/products/expdev/images/NE.GIF

I just thought I'd fill you in on this new feature.


Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
                      |                                  |
                      |           THE OPEN LAB           |
                      |    Open Source Bioinformatics    |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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