For example, why not write a workflow that leverages If This Then That to flash the lights on for your Hue when you upload a file that has Accepted Statement of Work in it?
I eventually took a job writing business applications, workflow software used mostly by big banks for processing checks, and learned about the everyday world of software engineering.
For now, developers have to write their workflows by hand, though as Platform9 CEO and co-founder Sirish Raghuram tells me, the plan is to eventually launch a visual editor for Workflows, too.
However, experienced bioinformaticians commonly work at a lower programming level and write their workflows as custom scripts in a scripting language such as Bash, Perl or Python.
Writing Map Reduce workflows is prohibitive for many business analysts.
Toil can execute workflows written in both the Common Workflow Language (CWL, http://www.commonwl.org/), the Workflow Definition Language (WDL, https://github.com/broadinstitute/wdl), or Python.
Some use was also made of ARROWSMITH [ 6, 19, 20] and GOPubMed [ 21], as well as various workflows in the Taverna environment [ 22- 26], including the BioAID_DiseaseDiscovery workflow written by Marco Roos.
Surprisingly, out-of-the-box functionality such as the approval and routing capabilities disappeared; however, developers were still able to implement custom workflows by writing custom event handlers and binding them to a document library.
Perhaps more simply: researchers are more likely to examine (and perhaps tweak and reuse) a workflow written in a language (or graphical notation, etc).
It can be argued that by the time such features have been integrated into the script one has effectively written a new workflow system, and thus might have been better off adopting one from the start.
