Ant-based interactive workflow management: a case study on RMIakademikpersonel.kocaeli.edu.tr/ahmet.sayar/sci/ahmet.sayar02.10... · Ant-based interactive workﬂow management: a

Ant-based interactive workflow management: a case study on RMI

Ahmet Sayar*,†

Department of Computer Engineering, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey

SUMMARY

This paper proposes a web-based interactive workflow definition and invocation system assisting users inorchestrating a set of distributed services-activities and expressing complex dependencies between themin XML. We use Ant, which is a Java-based and freely distributed commodity tool, for workflow definitionsand workflow engine. Adopting Ant as a workflow engine provides platform independence and immediateintegration into the Grid services framework. Sometimes, workflow scripts need to be used repeatedly with alittle change; framework enables reusable scripts to be created, stored and edited for later use. This allowssharing and dynamic modifications of workflows between multiple participants. The practicality andusefulness of the system is demonstrated through a concrete case study on Remote Method Invocation(RMI) jobs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 14 January 2013; Revised 13 August 2013; Accepted 2 February 2014

KEY WORDS: workflow; ant; distributed processes; interactive; RMI

1. INTRODUCTION

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists are building more and morecomplex applications to manage and process large data sets, as well as to execute scientificexperiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composingand executing complex workflows [1]. Scientific workflows are becoming increasingly importantas a mechanism for orchestrating distributed resources such as computational devices, data,applications and scientific instruments on the Grid environment. However, the lack of genericgraphical interfaces that abstract the technical details for domain scientists has gradually becomea major obstacle for them to easily master the workflow systems.Process management is very crucial in large scale science and business applications. Some

processes might need to involve some other processes to fulfill their goals. These processes arecalled dependable processes and should run in coordination and in a synchronized way. Dependen-cies and orderings among those processes are defined by a user or a main process. The documentsdefining orderings and dependability of tasks are basically named as workflow scripts. These issuesare studied in workflow research domain.Workflow management systems are mostly deployed in science portals [2] for remote exper-

iment control and collaborative, Grid-based distributed analysis in applied sciences, using cross-institutional integration of heterogeneous information and resources. They are also used,smoothly connecting the data producing equipment to the compute, storage and visualizationcenter, which are usually not on the same site. Workflow systems aim at collaboration and/orintegration of (i) data sources, (ii) expert scientists from various domains and (iii) super computers,which are geographically dispersed.

*Correspondence to: Ahmet Sayar, Department of Computer Engineering, Kocaeli University Kocaeli, Turkey.†E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMSInt. J. Commun. Syst. 2015; 28:1329–1339Published online 3 March 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.2766

This paper presents an interactive workflow management framework based on a build tool calledAnt [3]. Ant is a build and deployment tool for the projects written in Java. It is open source,platform-independent and freely distributed by Apache Software Foundation [4]. Ant supportssequential and parallel execution containers that allow subtasks to be executed in sequence or inparallel, respectively. Ant provides a flexible mechanism to express script dependencies in a projectbuild process. Ant tasks and dependencies are expressed in XML.The proposed system aims at collaboration and cooperation of multi-disciplinary teams located at

geographically dispersed sites. Some people have more experience and knowledge for somespecific jobs, and others might need their help to create a workflow script to run applications. Insuch collaboration, the first group of people takes over the admin role, and the second group ofpeople takes over the user role. Admin creates template workflow scripts (which is a kind of antbuild.xml file). Template defines application and workflow-specific rules and restrictions. In thetemplate, some parts are completed by admin and some parts are left for users to fill in. Users arepeople defining actual workflow scripts (instances), based on their application-specific purposes.They convert template build workflow script files into actual workflow scripts. These reusabletemplates help users to be able to use the applications appropriately. The system provides users withthe forms (templates) created with the admin-given parameters. The workflow scripts (instances)are created automatically by the system with the user-given parameters. The system also enablestriggering application run and see the outcomes on the interactive screen.The proposed system has advantages regarding creation and usage of workflows collaboratively.

In this respect, sometimes, workflow scripts need to be used repeatedly with a little change.Rewriting everything from the scratch and running them are time-consuming. Instead of doingrepeating parts, users need to update just changing parts. Updating and editing on previouslycreated workflow definitions are carried out by storing/fetching them to/from nonvolatile storages.Storages are located on local server’s file system.Another advantage of the system is related to ease of use. Application users might not know what

servers to be involved in and in what orders. They might not even know what parameters need to befed into the system. On the other hand, admin has better knowledge on the system and help users tocreate satisfying workflow definitions. We have created admin and user tools enabling creation andinvocation of Apache Ant build templates and corresponding instances remotely through graphicaluser interface. The proposed architecture gives the admin a control capability over the runningparameters of the workflow instances created by the application users. During the creation ofworkflow instances from the script templates, some parameters can be set by the user but otherscannot. These settings are carried out by the admin at the Ant build template creation stage. In orderto run an application through Ant workflow script instance, application users open their interfaceson the browser, select one of the workflow script templates, fill it out, run it and get the output onthe screen.The proposed system is tested in a use case scenario, which is based on Remote Method

Invocation (RMI) jobs. Jobs are defined in the form of Ant’s build target elements, and dependen-cies are defined according to the Ant’s build file schema. In the scenario, admin defines theworkflow, and users run the system with their application-specific parameters and get the outputson the screen as a log file.This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives related works on visual workflow designs.

Section 3 presents general framework of the proposed architecture. Section 4 is a case study onRMI jobs. Section 5 concludes the paper.

2. RELATED WORK

Process management is an extremely important concept in both business and scientific communi-ties. Several workflow management tools have been proposed in recent years offering advancedfunctionality in various domains. The idea of workflow is also used in network domain, such assensor networks and wireless networks. However, it might take different names such as linking[5] and chaining [6]. Liu et al. [5] propose a scheme on constructing a vehicular ad hoc network

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Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2015; 28:1329–1339DOI: 10.1002/dac

based on cluster chains. Xiaonan and Huanyan [6] address the joint link scheduling and multi-player communication challenges in wireless networks.In the business, considerable amount of works has been carried out on workflows. Flower [7],

Yawl [8], Staffware [9], WebSphere MQ Workflow [10], Cosa [11], SAP Workflow [12] andFileNet [13] can be given as examples of popular workflow systems developed so far. Theseproducts offer extensive functionality and support a variety of workflow patterns [14]. However,all of them are propriety software and commercially motivated, making it infeasible to use themfor open-source research projects. Although a few general-purpose open-source workflow toolkits[15] are available for use, they are platform-dependent and offer limited functionality.In the scientific world, several open-source workflow management tools are freely available.

However, they are directed toward service aggregation rather than distributed process managementin Grid computing [16, 17] and web service environments.Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) [18] is a widely accepted and used standard in

composition of web-services. It basically defines the standards for process definitions anddependence relations. However, generic graphical interfaces that abstract the technical details fordomain scientists are not defined by BPEL. Some researches have been conducted to address theseissues by developing BPEL-based visual scientific workflow designers. Triana [19], ChinaGridSupport Platform [20] and Jasmine [21] can be given as examples. Triana actually uses BPEL4WSto define the workflows. There are some other BPEL-based workflow designing projects in businessworld. Oracle’s BPEL Designer [22] provides a one-to-one mapping to BPEL and a flowconstructer. IBM’s BPWS4J [23] editor relies on a tree-based one-to-one representation of BPEL.In addition to BPEL-based visual workflow design systems, there are some other works. Taverna

[24] is aimed at developing workflows in bioinformatics domain on the Grid. It provides interactiveexecution and monitoring interfaces to handle workflows. It uses Simple Conceptual Unified FlowLanguage for workflows. Kepler [25] is another well-known workflow system enabling interactivevisual interface for designing workflows. It focuses on the actor-oriented design. An actor is anencapsulated process defined with its parameters. Executions are controlled according to thoseactors. Workflows are modeled as compositions of actors and saved in Modeling MarkupLanguage. The proposed system in this paper is similar to Kepler’s actor-based workflow system.The system enables workflow definitions a priori and controls the clients’ workflow creationsand executions by using those definitions. The proposed system also saves the workflows inXML-based format in accordance with Ant’s build file schema.GridAnt is another related work in this context. It proposes a client-controllable workflow system

and uses Ant for the pipeline processing. The Apache Ant [4] is basically a project deploymentframework in Java environments. It is platform-independent, XML-based and presents certaincharacteristics that seem to make it suitable as a workflow language and engine. Features such asnative dependence structured build targets make it easy to write declarative dependence-basedworkflows. One can consider workflows that can be described by an acyclic graph, where nodesof the graph represent a task to be performed and edges represent dependencies between tasks. Thisis harder to represent with a scripting language without a substantial additional framework behind it,but it is not at all difficult to represent with a tool like Ant [26].GridAnt extends Ant functionalities and capabilities to decrease its deficiencies in using as a

workflow tool, but we use Ant in its pure form and propose an intermediary architecture enablingcreation of Ant build tools as workflow scripts. We also provide application users with the toolsto run distributed chained processes remotely in accordance with the predefined workflows. Wepropose general tasks and focus on the creation of script-based workflow templates interactively.

3. ARCHITECTURE

Tasks are rarely standalone; they often depend on each other’s outcomes. Thus, for complexprocesses, coordinating the execution of lengthy sequences of tasks manually is counter-productive,uninteresting and error-prone. Handling such systems even becomes worse when the task runs ondifferent machines belonging to the different administrative domains.

1331ANT-BASED INTERACTIVE WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT


There are some ways to put the tasks in order and chain them accordingly to achieve the system-wide goals. Using both workflow languages and corresponding workflow engines is the most effi-cient way of doing this. Workflows are different from the scheduling [27–30]. Scheduling is themethod by which threads, processes or data flows are given access to system resources (e.g., pro-cessor time and communications bandwidth). In the workflow, the concern is the process flowand their order. Workflow engines are the heart of the workflow systems. The engines are respon-sible for directing the flow of control and data through multiple activities and tasks. In the proposedsystem, tasks are named as targets. Rather than developing the engine from scratch, we reuse anexisting commodity tool called Ant. Ant is open source, written in Java and freely distributed bythe Apache Software Foundation. Adopting Ant as a workflow engine provides platform indepen-dence and immediate integration into the Grid services framework. Ant tasks and dependencies canbe conveniently expressed in XML, and it makes users and machines to easily read and understandthe workflow scripts.Ant is designed around the concept of targets and tasks. Targets exist only as top-level

entities. Dependencies between targets are specified using target names as handles. Targets inAnt are executed sequentially, without the possibility to exploit the parallelism inherent in adependence-based specification. Targets are composed of tasks that are generally executedsequentially. In the chain, each process is defined in tag ‘target’, and flow orderings are definedby attribute ‘depends’. For example, if job A depends on job B, then job B should precede jobA, and target defining job B should have attribute ‘depends=job A’. <parallel> tag element inAnt build schema enable to execute tasks in parallel. Each task in its thread runs sequentially.Conditional behaviors between the parallel tasks can be modeled at the target level accordingto the given target properties.The proposed framework is composed of two major parts (Figure 1). One is for creating

workflow templates (Admin Tools) and another is for creating final workflow script instances (UserTools). All the templates and instances are kept in the servers’ local file systems as different Antbuild files. Users and admin interact with the system through a browser. These two servers’ rolesare illustrated in Figure 2. These roles are explained in Sections 3.1 and 3.2.In Figure 1, templates for the predefined workflows are listed as T-1, T-2, T-3 and T-4. These are

created by admin users. When the users want to run any workflow, they need to select one of thesetemplates and enter their own parameters for the job to execute and return the results. T1 I-1, T1 I-2and T1 I-3 are three workflow instances created from template T-1 by the actual users. Administra-tors (admin users) and actual users both interact with the system through browsers.Workflow templates as shown in Figure 1 are stored in repository implemented as local file

system on the server. They are actually XML-based Ant build files. Users interact (add, edit anddelete) with them through visualization components of the system. Apache Ant’s standard

Figure 1. Proposed web-based architecture.

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specification for the Ant build files is used as metadata for the templates to be created and edited. Italso enables us to create interactive visualization components over the templates.The aim in designing a workflow repository was to dynamically include workflow templates or

provide the ability to modify the templates while a workflow is in progress. Remote access to therepository is also an important consideration in order to utilize the components of the workflowsystem in a collaborative environment by providing remote workflow template storage and accessto distributed group members.

3.1. Admin tools

Admin is provided with three capabilities, creating, editing and deleting of template files. The rootelement of the templates is element ‘project’. Project element might have more than one targetelements. Each target element represents an independent task or job. If any task, or job, is relatedto any other task, this relation is expressed by using ‘depends’ attributes of the target tag elements.An XML script in what follows illustrates a simple dependence scenario for the tasks ls and echo.A template might be an instance in case of that admin does not give any option for users to enter,

and the entire template is filled out and all the elements are assigned by the admin. If the adminwants to give ability for users to define any tag value, then that tag value is set to a specific value‘ON’ in the template file. All the options and restrictions on template files, and indirectly onworkflow instances, are defined by the admin users. SSHEXEC page of the project in Figure 2can be given as an example. In this example, the admin frees the users to enter their host names,but job can be run only by username ‘asayar’. For the other attributes, you can have a look at theApache Ant web site [3].

Figure 2. A sample workflow template created with admin tools.



The possible job wrapping tags in Ant are scp, sshexec and exec. Figure 2 shows an example ofjob wrappings using sshexec.

You can put this sshexec element inside the target named ‘echo’ previously. You can also createtask ‘ls’, similar to sshexec created for the previous echo, and put it in another target named ‘ls’. Atthe end, you will have a completed template or an instance. This example gives basic informationabout how to create a workflow script using Apache Ant. Figure 5 shows a sample templateworkflow script ready for creating a workflow instance by a user.

3.2. User tools

User tools enable application users to create actual workflow scripts. The scripts are created fromtemplates. When a user opens a browser, available templates are listed, and users select one of themto create his own custom workflow script.Figure 5 illustrates a sample scenario for a user to create his custom workflow by using user tools.

Whenever user updates any value on the left-hand side of the figure, workflow script instance isupdated on the right-hand side. After having finished with creating the final script, users run theapplications and have the outcomes on the right-hand side of the panel shown in Figure 5. Withoutrestarting the server or the browser, users can rerun the script with minor changes again and again.The values of the user-editable parameters and tag attributes are written in text boxes, and others

are already assigned by the admin and not allowed to change. These authorization settings aredefined by the administrators through admin tools presented in Section 3.1.

4. USE CASE SCENARIO ON TRACING RMI JOBS

RemoteMethod Invocation is a type of remote procedure call that is network-independent, lightweightand totally portable, as it is written in pure Java. An RMI is essentially the same as an RPC, except thatit operates on objects instead of applications. In RPC and RMI, the caller and callee both need to be upand running at the time of communication. This is called transient communication. In addition, theyneed to know exactly how to refer to each other. An RMI is specifically designed for Java objects.It allows remote Java objects on different JVM to communicate across the Internet. Communicationis mostly achieved through process call.In this scenario, we enable clients to trace Java RMI [31] jobs and display the outcomes on the

user’s screen by using the proposed workflow tools. The outcome is actually a log file originatedby the RMI servers and returned to the machine where network manager is located. The systemconsists of three different components. These are RMI server (RMIS), RMI client (RMIC) andNetwork Manager (NM). Workflow engine is deployed at NM. The sample scenario and the rela-tion between the components are illustrated in Figure 3. NM database provides the workflowscripts, which are created beforehand as a separate application (Chapter 3). The scripts are calledinstances and created from ant template build files, according to the application purposes and byusing interactive workflow tools. The whole system is developed and tested in Local Area Network.Figure 3 illustrates the sample workflow scenario for tracking the RMIC and server

communications for predefined jobs. Figure 3 presents a workflow from the computational nodes’point of view. The numbers over the arrows define the orders and hierarchy among the tasks inthe workflow.

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Figure 4 represents same scenario from a different point of view, that is, from process communi-cation point of view. The sample workflow is shown as an acyclic graph in Figure 4 in terms ofant’s target-task compositions.Figure 4 is target-based, or task-based, representation of the sample scenario given in Figure 3.

The corresponding build file, which is a workflow script, is given in APPENDIX. The build fileexplains the targets and orders among them to achieve the expected results. The arrows in Figure 4represent dependence relations between the tasks. Ant uses the term target for the tasks. The termstask and target are used interchangeably throughout the paper. Table I illustrates the machines(NM, RMIS and RMIC) and their assigned tasks in the proposed system. The tasks to be assignedare compiling (compile), creating executable jar packages for RMIC and servers (jar), starting up

Figure 3. Sample workflow scenario.

Figure 4. Task hierarchies, dependence relations.

Table I. Machines and their tasks in the system.

Tasks

Machines

NM RMIC RMIS

Compile XJar XRMI-Server-Client-Run X XGetClientLogRun X

NM, Network Manager; RMIC, Remote Method Invocation client; RMIS, Remote MethodInvocation server.



the client and server machines (RMI-Server-Client-Run), sending the log files to the network man-ager (GetClientLog) and showing the log files on the user interface at user-client side (run).Target-6 is called RMI-Server-Client-Run, and starts up RMIS and RMIC. It is represented with

the arrows numbered 1 in Figure 3. Target-6 runs both client and server at the same time; there is noorder among them. This is achieved by using ant’s standard tags called <parallel> and <sshexec>.<sshexec> is used to run remote jobs packed as jars, and <parallel> is used to notify the antengine to run all the jobs defined in <sshexec> to run parallel. The tasks (or jobs) are alreadyput into the servers RMIS and RMIC as executable jar packages beforehand. They are placed underthe folder C:/ of the corresponding machines’ local file systems (see command parameter in target-6in the Appendix). These packages are run through <sshexec>, and the parameter <timeout> is setto 0. Zero means there is no timeout set for the task, in other words, server needs to be carried outwith the first task to go on to the next one. The arrows numbered 1 and 2 in Figure 3 representclient-server paradigm in distributed computing, which is RMI in this case. The arrow 2 is requestand arrow 3 is response. The API level communication details are not given here.Target-7 is called GetClientLog. It aims at sending the communication logs are created at the

end of application run. Log file is provided by RMIS and sent to the user through the networkmanager. This is represented with arrows numbered 4 and 5 in Figure 3. Logs are text-basedfiles created once and updated over the time in which server and clients are up and running.A log file contains details such as creation times of servers, exceptions thrown or failures. Inthe proposed framework, log files are sent to the network manager through secure copy sub task<scp>. <scp> is ant’s built-in task definition. Its standard properties and their values for thesample scenario are given in what follows.

Figure 5. (User tool) A sample template is edited, and a workflow script is created.

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For the client interaction with the system, defining the client and server names, giving the user-defined parameters and showing the results of the tracking system, we have also developed userinterface tools. These are separated from the ant build template and instance creation tools. Targets1, 2 and 3 explain that part of the system. These are all carried out at the network manager site.Target-1 is called Compile. It aims at compiling the required classes and packages for the

application. This is carried out through Ant’s built-in subtask called<javac>. It has some attributessuch as srcdir and destdir. Srcdir defines the location of source codes to be compiled, and destdirdefines the location in which the compiled source codes to be placed. The following task is jar,which is defined in target-2. It creates executable jar packages from the target code in destdircreated by target-1. Target-3 is called run. It runs the jar package coming from target-2 and opensup user interface interactive tools for the users to provide the required parameters for the applicationto run appropriately. It also shows the results on the user screen. This is carried out by Ant’s built-insubtask called <exec> (see Appendix for the details).

5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The work presented in this paper is an interactive and visual workflow system assisting users inorchestrating a set of distributed services-activities and expressing complex dependencies betweenthem in XML. Interactive visual tools hide the complexity of the system and make it easy to handlethe distributed services. Implementation and design of the proposed framework is demonstrated.We also demonstrated the proposed workflow system’s feasibility and effectiveness through a casestudy on RMI jobs.Rather than developing the engine from scratch, we reuse an existing commodity tool called Ant.

Ant is open source, written in Java and freely distributed by the Apache Software Foundation.Adopting Ant as a workflow engine provides platform independence and immediate integration intothe Grid services framework. Ant tasks and dependencies can be conveniently expressed in XML,and it makes users and machines to easily read and understand the workflow scripts.The proposed system enables separation of configuration and run-time stages. Templates are

created at configuration time by admin users. Actual workflow scripts are created at run-time bythe application users. The system also enables sharing and replicating workflow scripts with otherusers. This increases the number and types of the users of Grids. That is, any user can use thesystem without having deep knowledge of application science domains.Eliminating the rewriting of repetitive parts of a workflow definition is the most important future

of the proposed workflow system. Multiple uses of abstract models for a given process are possiblewithout having to redefine it. Admin defines the abstract model (in XML schema) for a givenprocess, and then, users create workflow scripts in accordance with those abstract models throughGUI. This enables controllable and easy to use system. Abstract models and user scripts can bechanged dynamically and stored in local file system by admin and users, respectively (Figure 5).Because of its main targeted usage area, Ant lacks several aspects in supporting sophisticated

workflow requirements. Workflows created by using Apache Ant are not powerful enough for mostdistributed applications. Ant lacks the functionality to support workflow compositions. Ant pro-vides mechanisms only to direct the flow of control. It lacks the infrastructure to support workflowcomposition allowing the output of one activity to become the input to another and defining thenumber of iteration for any process execution. In the future, we are going to enhance the proposedarchitecture by eliminating these drawbacks through some extension to the XML-based Ant buildschema files.The system presented in this paper is a work in progress. Although an initial prototype is

available for evaluation, it will undergo significant extensions based on users’ feedbacks. Regardinguser interfaces, we plan to use XSL [32] and XSLT [32] for creating graphical user interfaces fromthe template files created by admin. However, Ant schema is too large; creating XSLT file forconversion might not help for the performance issues, but it is worth to try. We also plan to testand apply our proposed admin and user interactive tools to real geophysics applications such asPattern Informatics [33] and Virtual California (VC) [34].



APPENDIX A. ANT BUILD.XML FOR A SAMPLE SCENARIO GIVEN IN FIGURES 3 AND 4

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Ant-based interactive workflow management: a case study on RMIakademikpersonel.kocaeli.edu.tr/ahmet.sayar/sci/ahmet.sayar02.10... · Ant-based interactive workﬂow management: a