One of the fundamental problems with tools like yours above is that they do not help with the idiosyncrasies of bioinformatics.
One still needs to get well trained and understand bioinformatics, what the parameters are called etc.
A better approach would be to seamlessly integrate especially the inputs and outputs. A user should not need to know that a file is gzipped or not, it should be trivial to detect that and unpack it, unzipping files should not be something we need to remember. Gzipping is not a pipeline element, it is not science.
Same with inputs, say I want to pass a reference to bwa or blast or minimap or bowtie, I don't want to have to remember that it should be -in for makeblastdb, but it should be and indexed -x for bowtie2 etc. The pipeline's smarts should take care of that.
Right now your tool is just a variant of a makefile, or a snakemakefile or nextflow. Each of these approaches suffers from the same problem. You already have to know and be an expert command line user, only then can you meaningfully use the pipeline. But basically what it means it requires another layer of expertise.
Make it so you can just combine a genome + query and pass it to a tool, then the framework figures out what it needs to do to make the files suited for processing.
Hi, this looks great. Quite impressive documentation too. I got hooked on using snakemake for my pipelines, so it's always a challenge to convince people that they have to invest time to learn something new (like bioflows). Are there specific features that are different between snakemake and bioflows?
congrats on the release. Since there are many workflow frameworks out there, it might be helpful to include a comparison of Bioflows to other systems, especially CWL, Nextflow, and Snakemake, since those seem to be some of the most popular in bioinformatics.
Bioflows will supersede these engines soon. CWL is a standard that will be supported by Bioflows engine soon. NextFlow and SnakeMake were there and people used to use them. People always resist new things. But the flexibility and power of Bioflows will make these tools obsolete in few years. I already made a comparison in a power point, but I have hard time to keep up writing documentation , adding new features, testing current release and doing other things. But I will publish these comparisons when i publish the second release of BioFlows with distributed support and HPC. Currently, Bioflows 0.0.3a supports DRMAA specification, supports PBS torque, Slurm and Sun Grid Engine but I am testing that now and will soon merge that into master branch soon.
That's a bold and ambitious statement! Looking forward to new features, and I hope to have time to play with this at some point.