Flow Description Language

In the earlier section, you built a flow by interactively calling the wrapper program for each job. That was a useful exercise to understand a simple way to register a job with FlowTracer, how to establish runtime tracing for the job, and how to monitor a flow using the GUI console. However, that is not how FlowTracer would be used for production.

The FlowTracer product does not expect a product flow to be registered by interactively registering each job one at a time from the command line. Instead, the normal use is:
  • Develop a description of the jobs to register, using the Flow Description Language (FDL)
  • Register the jobs and instantiate the flow using the vovbuild command
  • Request a "run" to have FlowTracer schedule and deploy jobs as necessary in parallel

In this tutorial, you will develop a few simple flows by writing a job description file and registering the jobs with vovbuild.

Tasks in This Tutorial