Boutiques: a flexible framework for automated application integration in computing platforms
This addresses the challenge of application integration for researchers in computational platforms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing containerization and JSON technologies.
The authors tackled the problem of integrating and executing applications across computational platforms by developing Boutiques, a framework that uses JSON-described software containers, resulting in support by multiple virtual research platforms and deployment for dozens of neuroinformatics applications.
We present Boutiques, a system to automatically publish, integrate and execute applications across computational platforms. Boutiques applications are installed through software containers described in a rich and flexible JSON language. A set of core tools facilitate the construction, validation, import, execution, and publishing of applications. Boutiques is currently supported by several distinct virtual research platforms, and it has been used to describe dozens of applications in the neuroinformatics domain. We expect Boutiques to improve the quality of application integration in computational platforms, to reduce redundancy of effort, to contribute to computational reproducibility, and to foster Open Science.