While Apps for platforms such as iPhone and Android have become very popular in recent years, there are few (if any) examples of Apps that are useful in a research setting. One category of successful Apps may be said to be those that provide simple and quick access to small pieces of essential information. One situation in which researchers may find such features useful is when they are waiting for long-running computional analyses on a server to finish. In biology and medicine, researchers often need to run a large number of analyses on servers, where each analysis job may take from hours to weeks to finish. As further progress with a project may await such jobs to finish, a researcher may want to check regularly whether any jobs have finished. A popular platform for running analysis jobs in biology and medicine is the Galaxy system, where there will soon also be such a UiO-instance of the system hooked up to the Abel computing cluster.
The goal of the task is to develop an iPhone and/or Android App that allows users to check the status of their jobs running on a Galaxy platform. The App will be configured to work with a specific user name at a selected Galaxy instance. It will then allow connecting with this instance to retrieve the status of jobs the user has running. The app should allow general browsing of initiated and completed jobs of a user, as well as various forms of practical shortlists.