About This Document

    This README file accompanies the automatically built release for the
    Meandre application set released by the National Center for Supercomputing
    Applications.

Table of Contents

    1) Meandre Overview
    2) Directory Contents

1) Meandre Overview

    Meandre is a semantic enabled web-driven, dataflow execution environment.
    It provides the machinery for assembling and executing data flows -software
    applications consisting of software components that process data (such as
    by accessing a data store, transforming the data from that store and
    analyzing or visualizing the transformed results).

    Within Meandre, each flow is represented as a graph that shows executable
    components (i.e., basic computational units, or building blocks) as icons
    linked through their input and output connections. Based on the inputs and
    properties of a executable component, a unique output is generated upon
    execution.

    Meandre also provides publishing capabilities for flows and components,
    enabling users to assemble a repository of components for reuse and
    sharing.  This allows users to leverage other research and development
    efforts by querying and integrating component descriptions that have been
    published previously at other shareable repository locations. 


2) Release Directory Contents

    The release build process creates several artifacts for publication in this
    directory:

    * End-user distributions for Linux, Mac, and Windows. These distributions
    contain executables for the Meandre Infrastructure server and Meandre
    Workbench server.

        Meandre-<VERSION>-linux.zip
        Meandre-<VERSION>-mac.zip
        Meandre-<VERSION>-win.zip

    * Source code distributions for Meandre Infrastructure and Meandre Workbench.
    These source distributions are taken directly from the NCSA's source code 
    archives and contain Ant build configuration files.
        
        Meandre-<VERSION>-infrastructure-src.zip
        Meandre-<VERSION>-workbench-src.zip

    * A J2EE .war file version of the Meandre Workbench. This War file is ready
    to be deployed in any Java application server.

        Meandre-Workbench-<VERSION>.war

    * Binary files (Jar files) to compile and run source code files of the
    ZigZag language for defining Flows.

        zz-<VERSION>.jar
        zzc-<VERSION>.jar
        zzre-<VERSION>.jar

    * A jar file containing the Meandre Infrastructure server with a builtin
    application server.  The web server can be started on port 1714 by running
    the command: '>java -jar meandre-server-<VERSION>.jar'

        meandre-server-<VERSION>.jar


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