Airavata in Five Minutes.

The purpose of this tutorial is to give a basic understanding of how Airavata works. For a more advanced understanding please refer the 10 minute tutorial.

Introduction

This tutorial will explain how to use Airavata to invoke a simple Web Service by creating a workflow.

Prerequisites

Airavata 0.1 or later
OS Linux or Mac Prefered
Java 1.6 or higher

Lets Start...

Tutorial is divided in to 3 simple sections. Namely,
- Setting up Environment
- Creating XBaya Workflows
- Executing & Monitoring XBaya Workflows

Setting Up Environment

  1. Build from source or download a binary distribution
  2. Extract the Airavata binary distribution to some path in the file system (say AIRAVATA_HOME)
    1. If you built from source then your binary is in modules/distribution/target
    2. If you are using Windows + Cygwin you need to set permissions on some files with "chmod 755 bin/*.sh"
      • we don't currently provide bat scripts for the following actions - patches welcome
  3. Start airavata:
    • Start Jackrabbit repository on port 8081
      $ AIRAVATA_HOME/bin/jackrabbit-server.sh
    • Start SimpleAxis2Server on port 8080
      $ AIRAVATA_HOME/bin/airavata-server.sh
    • Start XBaya
      $ AIRAVATA_HOME/bin/xbaya-gui.sh

The SimpleAxis2Server will expose SimpleMathServcie. We will invoke this service in our XBaya workflow.

Creating XBaya Workflows

  1. Configure XBaya to use the Jackrabbit repository From the main menu select:
    Registry -> Setup JCR Registry
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    If you are using the default Jackrabbit server from airavata use the following information,

    URL http://localhost:8081/rmi
    Username admin
    Password admin
    2
    You will notice a new Component (Application Services) added in Components view (located in left side of XBaya window).
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  2. Make XBaya aware of simple-math-service From the main menu select:
    XBaya -> Import -> WSDL from URL...
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    Specify the WSDL URL as follows:
    http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/SimpleMathService?wsdl
    5

    If the WSDL was succefully added you will see another Component in Components view. Expand the new Component until you see the available operations for SimpleMathServcie.
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  3. Create the workflow

    Now create a new workflow from XBaya -> New -> Workflow so you will get a new workflow sheet in to XBaya.

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    In our workflow we will invoke the greet method in SimpleMathServcie.

    From Components view select & drag-drop the following in to workflow sheet in the center of XBaya window.
    - the greet Method
    - Components -> System Components -> Input
    - Components -> System Components -> Output
    10

    Connect the added components as shown in the figure
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You have now successfully created a workflow to invoke the greet operation in the SimpleMathService.

Executing & Monitoring XBaya Workflows

Now Its time to invoke the workflow. To invoke, From the main menu select:
Run -> Run workflow...
Or just click on the red play icon at the top of XBaya. 12
Specify the input Value (Notification topic and GFac URL will work with default values).
Click OK.

Your workflow will now launch and the Monitoring view at the bottom of XBaya will show you the progress of the workflow execution.
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