Taverna 2.1-beta-2 "2.1 beta 2"

Welcome to Taverna 2.1 Beta 2 workbench
=======================================

Due to user response to Taverna 2 workbench, major improvements have
been made to the user interface of Taverna 2.1 Beta 2 workbench. Many
of these are described here.

Future improvements are planned, especially in the viewing of
results.

Overall organization
====================

The workflow explorer has been moved from the right-hand side of
Taverna workbench to below the service panel.

Service panel
=============

The service panel replaces the activity palette of Taverna 2
workbench. It has a simplified and more familiar interface.

The services are now organized so that Service templates i.e. services
that always require configuration such as Beanshell, are grouped
together.

The tree used to display the services is more natural, with
service-type specific organization within the branches.

The service panel allows filtered search of services. Type in text to
search on and the service panel will just show the matching services.
Note that it may match on attributes of the services that are not
immediately visibile.

The service panel automatically saves the set of service providers
that are loaded. This means that if you add a new WSDL then it will
be there the next time you start Taverna.

Service providers can be removed from the service panel.

Adding services to the workflow
===============================

You can now add services to the current workflow by right-clicking on
the service in the service panel. You can still drag-and-drop the
service into either the workflow explorer or the workflow diagram.

If the service that you add needs to be configured, then the
configuration panel for that type of service will automatically
pop-up.

Workflow creation
=================

You can now use all of the necessary workflow creation and editing
functions from within the workflow explorer. Merges and control links
(for "run after" specification) are now shown in the workflow
explorer.

Merges can now be configured to control the order in which the data
arriving is combined.

Objects in the workflow explorer and workflow diagram can be
configured by right-clicking on them.

Data link creation is more intelligent so that it does not allow the
creation of loops.

The workflow diagram can now be scrolled using standard scrollbars.

Run dialog
==========

The run dialog has been changed so that a graphical representation of
the workflow and information about the ports, including example values
is shown. The mechanism for entering input values for ports has been
made more user-friendly.

The dialog "remembers" the values used for previous runs of the
workflow.

Results viewing
===============

The results view now shows when all the data has arrived at an output
(the port turns grey) and also gives an indication of whether the
workflow is still running.

The number of iterations of a service during the run is shown in the
top right of the service.

If any calls to a service fail, then the service is shown in red and
the number of failures shown in the bottom right of the service.

Intermediate results of a service can be examined by clicking on the
service. The input and output values for each iteration of the
service can be examined. The results for several services can be
viewed at the same time (in separate windows).

You can zoom and scroll within the monitored view of the workflow run.

Data storage
============

The storing of the values passed between services has been made more
efficient. The values are now stored, if necessary, in a database.
Because of the in-memory caching used, there is negligible impact on
workflow runtime whilst allowing the handling of larger datasets.

Known issues
============

As this is a beta, there are some issues which will be fixed for the
Taverna 2.1 release. These are detailed in known-issues.txt