Re: WDL vs CWL

[Jeff Gentry]

Hi Alfy -

I apologize for the delay here, I missed this originally. First, a
disclaimer - I work on the team that developed WDL, so take anything I
say with a grain of salt.

The fundamental difference in my eyes is that WDL was designed to make
one particular use case as easy and intuitive as possible. In
contrast, CWL's goal is to empower a large number of use cases in a
reasonable fashion. So IMO the relative advantages and disadvantages
depend on what a user's particular use case is and what they want to
do.

I should also add that both parties have a desire to bring the two
languages closer together so hopefully over time it all becomes one
big happy family.

My guess is that the CWL folks would rather not clutter up their list
with WDL talk, so I'd encourage you to ask your CWL specific questions
here. If you'd like to chat more about WDL, I'd encourage you to head
over to our brand new support forum:
http://gatkforums.broadinstitute.org/wdl/categories/ask-the-wdl-team -
I'm sure both camps would love to talk about their technology with you
at length.

Thanks
J

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 2:14 PM, alfy <zxue....@gmail.com> wrote:
> WDL or CWL, what's the advantage and disadvantage of one over the other,
> please?
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "common-workflow-language" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to common-workflow-la...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to
> common-workf...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/common-workflow-language/d1b59bee-ada0-4ca0-b5dd-9e2fe620506e%40googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Michael Miller]

hi jeff,

thanks for the reply, makes a lot of sense. could you elaborate on the use
case that WDL makes easy, what's its characteristics?

cheers,
michael

Michael Miller
Software Engineer
Institute for Systems Biology

> To post to this group, send email to common-workflow-
> lang...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/common-workflow-

> language/CA%2BBw4v1zWaA5ii%3D8DW81fGsgrTnLrhm64JqMLTQ_e-
> 6CnzOKCA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Scott Frazer]

I'd say judge for yourself if it's easier or not for your use case!  Here are some examples of WDL tasks/workflows:

https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/userguide/topic?name=wdl-scripts

Here are some CWL tools that have rough equivalents:

https://github.com/common-workflow-language/workflows/tree/master/tools

Not entirely apples-to-apples, but it's the best I can come up with!

- Scott

> > email to common-workflow-language+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

> > To post to this group, send email to
> > common-workf...@googlegroups.com.
> > To view this discussion on the web visit
> > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/common-workflow-
> language/d1b59bee-ada0-4ca0-b5dd-9e2fe620506e%40googlegroups.com.
> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "common-workflow-language" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an

> email to common-workflow-language+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Jeff Gentry]

Hi Michael -

Our focus with WDL was to take the space of defining tasks in the
context of a workflow to be executed as simple and straightforward as
possible. While both have 'W' as part of their acronym it turns out
that there's a lot of other useful stuff one would want to do in this
space. My own view of the world is that CWL is a more generalized
solution which empowers folks across the board - this is particularly
useful if you want to involve different sorts of applications (e.g. a
GUI tool builder, a tool repository, an execution engine, some sort of
higher level management application).

J