[Biococoa-dev] Alignment & HMM Support in Biococoa

[Alexander Griekspoor]

Instead of having to set 100 flags before being able to run the thing, 
it might be a good idea to see if you can discriminate different types 
of task (like ones that have a return value vs ones that only input 
stuff, or vice versa) and see if you can have them in a kind of 
hierarchy. That would allow to create a base BCTaskController with a 
number of more specialized subclasses. Often I like that approach more 
than a one-for-all-with-way-too-many-options approach... Think about 
it..
Cheers,
Alex

On 22-feb-05, at 21:46, John Timmer wrote:

>>> Incidentally, I recently wound up building OS-X versions of Muscle 
>>> and
>>> ClustalW.  Now that our sequence object is stabilizing a bit, I was
>>> wondering if people thought it might be worth some effort trying to
>>> write a
>>> generic wrapper that could feed our sequences to command line apps 
>>> and
>>> get a
>>> result back?  This would potentially help us provide a layer of
>>> abstraction
>>> to a large number of Unix tools.
>> Do I understand you correctly that you want to generate a general
>> NSTaskController that does the following:
>> BCSequence -> NSString -> Run Task with arguments -> parse output ->
>> BCSequence or other objects?
> More or less.  Give the user the option of whether to have our 
> existing file
> reading classes try to interpret the output, or to have it returned as 
> a
> string and let them sort it out.
>
>
>>> The reason this comes to mind is that I'm finding that a lot of these
>>> things
>>> only take input in a limited number of formats, and we've already got
>>> format
>>> conversion code in place....
>> The real question is how you can make the thing multipurpose instead 
>> of
>> having tens of different controllers for very specific tasks... But 
>> you
>> must have something in mind right?
> Flags - lots and lots of flags.
>
> The idea is that most of these tools have a limited number of file 
> formats
> they take as input.  Some of them can take input from stdin, others 
> need
> files.  Some output a single file, others multiple files.  We need to 
> give
> the user enough opportunity to work with as many as possible.
>
> The point of the wrapper would be to do what your initial comment 
> suggested,
> but also automate handling things like creating tmp files as needed, 
> reading
> from the STDOUT and STDERR pipes, handling conversions back to 
> BCSequences,
> cleaning up, sending callback messages, etc.
>
> Clearly, there are going to be a bunch of user-supplied flags that will
> differ between tasks, but I think a lot of the grunt work could be 
> wrapped,
> so that most tools could be run as something like the following:
>
> BCTask *myTask;
> [myTask setSequence: mySequnce];
> [myTask setUsesSTDIN: NO];  /// know to use a tmp file
> [myTask setInputFormat: BCFastaFormat];
> [myTask setAdditionalFlags: myFlagArray];
> [myTask setUsesSTDOUT:  NO];  // use a tmp output file
> [myTask setCallBack: @selector(taskDone:contextInfo:) target: self
> contextInfo: nil];
> [myTask setCreatesSequencesFromOutput: YES];
> [myTask setRetainsSTDERRasString: YES];
> [myTask launch];
>
>
>
>
>
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*********************************************************
                     ** Alexander Griekspoor **
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              The Netherlands Cancer Institute
              Department of Tumorbiology (H4)
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                    Tel:  + 31 20 - 512 2023
                    Fax:  + 31 20 - 512 2029
                   AIM: mekentosj at mac.com
                    E-mail: a.griekspoor at nki.nl
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