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Workbench » History » Revision 2

Revision 1 (Tom Clegg, 04/10/2013 02:13 PM) → Revision 2/7 (Tom Clegg, 04/10/2013 02:21 PM)

h1. Workbench 

 Workbench is a Ruby on Rails web application that uses the Arvados Rails SDK to provide a generic interface to Arvados. It exists for two reasons: 

 * Convenience -- sometimes it's quicker to click than to type, and sometimes it's nice to see progress bars instead of ASCII art. 
 * Example -- the source code is an example of how to use Arvados and the Rails SDK. 

 (In a sense, it is the web browser SDK -- but we don't call it that because we don't expect anyone to write an application by scripting a web browser.) 

 It does not have any special privileges[1]. privileges. Everything Workbench does can also be done with the command line tools or any other SDK. 

 fn1. There is one exception: Each site has an official Workbench installation with the privileges required to retrieve a user's API authentication tokens. This is necessary to give users access to API clients that aren't well suited to the OpenID authentication process, like the CLI tools.