Brief Interlude
We now have a basic understanding of how to call an conversion node on your data, we can visualize the results, now before we continue, lets address a few things.
😠So many steps...​
You may have noticed that we have to do a lot of steps to get to the point where we can visualize our data on an app. You might think that's to much hassle for nothing (and you might be right). But let us briefly explain we think its actually a good thing.
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Seperation of Concerns: We already installed 3 Apps to our Arkitekt instance. Omero, Napari and Fiji. Their provided functionality would have been easily possible to implement in a single App (actually Fiji would have been able to do that easily) But we think that seperating the functionality into multiple Apps has a few advantages. First of all, it allows these tools to concentrate on what they are really good at. Napari is first and foremost a visualization tool, it does not need to know anything about how to convert data from one format to another. Secondly it allows App developers to easily update their Apps without having to worry about breaking other Apps.
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Reusability: The concept of Nodes might seem alien at the start, but it allows for a more worry free design of your workflows. You can easily use nodes from different apps in your workflow, and not worry about how they are implemented.
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Customizability: The concept of Nodes and Plugins allows you to easily extend the functionality of your Arkitekt instance, without having to worry about breaking anything. Arkitekt only provides very little functionality out of the box, but you can easily extend and customize your installtion with the functionality you need.
That being said..
We understand that their might be alot of installation of tools or management of plugins involved and for a platform that is supposed to be used for automation, this is a bit ironic. But don't you worry. ..
We have an App for that!​
Yes. Apps to the rescue. But this one is especially sweet because there is no installation. And you have been using it all along. What? It's actually this documentation website.
You see, a lot of things can be an Arkitekt app and that includes this website. So we can actually use this website to install repositories or workflows to our Arkitekt instance.
You might have noticed the Connect button in the top right corner of this website. And if you click on it and you run this website on the same machine as your Arkitekt instance,
you will see a familiar connect screen that will prompt you to connect to your Arkitekt instance.
So just connect. We will wait here.