[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

[mpierce at cs.indiana.edu]

proposers_name: Marlon Pierce 
 
affiliation: Indiana University 

email: mpierce at cs.indiana.edu 

proposed_title: New Technologies for Science Portals 

session_type: tutorial 

proposed_duration: half day 

target_audience: technical experts, managers, users 

num_attendees: 20-50 

abstract: We follow up on the GGF 12 portal tutorial and the GGF 14 Science Gateways workshop to review technologies for building Grid computing portals.  We provide a brief introduction to Java portlet standards (JSR 168 and WSRP).  We then provide overviews of the GridSphere portal container, OGCE and GridSphere grid portlets, grid portal programming APIs, and advanced portal services, including semantic metadata management.  We also introduce the important new portlet-building technologies, JSF and AJAX.  These should make portlets easier to build and provide a higher level of dynamic user interactivity. 

synopsis: The goals of this session will be to provide an overview of the current state of the art for building Java-based Grid computing portals.  Our tutorial will be divided into 4 main sessions, described below.  The first session will include general introductory material suitable for a general audience.  The remaining sessions will discuss topics at a technical level and  will require Java programming experience, knowledge of XML, and deployment/development experience with Grid technologies.  

Our first session will review general portal technology and architecture.  The importance of standard-compliant Grid portlets, which we described in the GGF 12 tutorial, has been amply illustrated at the GGF 14 Science Gateways workshop.  We wish to follow up on this workshop by providing a nuts-and-bolts overview of the relevant Java standards.  Sample material is available from http://www.servogrid.org/slide/GEM/NMI/OGCE2TutorialMaterial/.  

Our second session will review new technologies for Grid portal building.  Several important developments have taken place since our last tutorial.  These include the release of Globus Toolkit 4, the maturation of portlet-building technologies such as Java Server Faces (JSF), and the emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), used notably by Google Maps.   We will therefore cover Grid portlet-building APIs, such as the Java CoG kit and GridSphere, which provide abstraction layers over different Grid toolkits.  We will also examine efforts to build reusable portlet components using such technologies as JSF, which provide an important simplification to portlet construction.  Portlets built using AJAX approaches similarly promise to greatly enhance the user interactivity that portlets can provide, allowing us to build much more sophisticated Grid portal interfaces.  

Our third session will review advanced portal services.  We will examine two exemplar services in some detail.  The first service will examine the problem of content and scientific data management using Grid and Semantic Web technologies.  We will base this discussion on the NCSA Tupelo system.  The second half of this session will examine science application support services such as the Indiana University Application Factory service.

In our final session, we will examine the problem of portal testing.  We will review available tools for both unit testing (such as HttpUnit) and load/stress testing (such as JMeter) and provide examples for their use.

This tutorial will involve participation from a number of GCE members, including members of the Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) group, the GridSphere team, and developers of TeraGrid Science Gateways.  GGF and supplemental mailing list announcements (such as to the TeraGrid community) will provide minimum outreach.  We welcome additional outreach support and recommendations.  
 

tech_requirements: No special requirements. 

prereq_participants: Knowledge of Java programming and general Grid computing. 

advertise_suggestion: The sessions may be announced using GGF and other mailing lists, such as announcements to TeraGrid mailing lists.