Workbench » History » Revision 6
Revision 5 (Tom Clegg, 04/17/2014 04:14 PM) → Revision 6/7 (Tom Clegg, 04/17/2014 06:35 PM)
h1. Workbench Developer documentation: * [[Hacking Workbench]] Workbench is the primary browser-based tool for Arvados users. In addition to providing built-in generic browsing tools for data and analysis jobs, Workbench acts as a gateway and integration point for analysis and visualization applications running in VMs on the cloud. The built-in browsing features in Workbench are also available via command line tools or any other SDK; Workbench does not need any special privileges[1]. The browsing features are offered for two reasons: * *Convenience* — Sometimes it's quicker to click than to type, and sometimes it's helpful to see progress bars instead of ASCII art. * *Example* — The source code is an example of how to use Arvados and the Rails SDK. The Arvados API and authentication system facilitate a smooth user experience and effective data sharing when working with multiple independent web-based applications. Workbench is built with Ruby on Rails using the Arvados Rails SDK. (In a sense, Workbench 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.) fn1. Exception: Each site has a an official Workbench installation which is trusted enough with the privileges required to see the retrieve a user's API authentication tokens _for a user who tokens. This is logged in necessary to that Workbench._ This gives the user a way to obtain authentication tokens for API clients/environments that aren't well suited to the OpenID/OAuth2 OpenID authentication process, like CLI tools.