What WILDFIRE is

WILDFIRE is the graphical editor for our GEL (Grid Execution Language) workflow engine.

But what is GEL?

GEL is an interpretor language we developed since late 2003.
It is designed to be portable across various platforms.
Currently, it can schedule programs over a single machine, SGE, PBS and LSF.
It also has an executor engine over Globus.
GEL has an expressive language which can be used to compose complex workflows.
It also has rules which prevents certain workflow to be executed.
GEL communicates between workflow objects through data file transfers.
As such, naming of input and output files of workflow objects have to be consistence.

So we know a little about GEL, but what is WILDFIRE's role in this?
WILDFIRE helps the user to program GEL without coding lines in GEL. Its design is kept simple to prevent GEL illegal constructs from occuring. To bring the user up to speed, WILDFIRE also incorporates the EMBOSS suite of programs (only the definitions not the source), so the user can get a feel of composing GEL workflow in WILDFIRE.

To the advanced user, WILDFIRE has an editor to construct custom program and thus custom workflows. However this will be covered in another tutorial .

WILDFIRE is not

It is not a business process workflow management system.
It is not web-service enabled. No need for all the http hassle!
It does not use Globus Toolkit 3+.

The WILDFIRE/GEL team in no particular order:

Francis Tang (QA), Ho Liang Yoong (Dirty work), Sebastian Ho (The extra hand), Arun Krishnan (Always demanding more dude, He also coined to the name).

WILDFIRE mainly uses:

GEF: graphical editing framework
J2SSH: open SSH implementation in java
Jemboss: Java interface to EMBOSS