[jsdl-wg] Re: JSDL?

[Donal K. Fellows]

Chin Chee-Kai wrote:
> I was browsing around for GGF13 when I chanced upon JSDL
> archived discussions on JSDL.  You appear to be answering
> some of the questions so I thought I could write to you
> for my perhaps overly-simplistic question:
> 
> What is JSDL?  Is it some kind of Job Service Description
> Language?  The team appears to be designing a kind of
> resource description XSD schema.

JSDL stands for Job Submission Description Language, and it's purpose is
to describe simple job descriptions. By simple, I mean a single
invocation of some program (or a webservice or an SQL lookup or whatever
else you want to do with extensibility), with possibly some files staged
in beforehand and staged out afterwards.

We are aware that it is an incomplete solution to the general problem of
job and workflow running on the grid. This because we envisage other
languages that mix into JSDL or wrap around JSDL to provide these
extended sets of functionality; we're trying to keep the focus of JSDL
itself small so that we can achieve a defined task in as short a time as
possible. This is covered in the specification (see Figure 2) though it
needs some more explanatory text.

> Could you give some pointers on JSDL, latest alpha/beta/full
> versions of XSDs available, or any info to me please?

The documents at https://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/docman/
are a out of date, but not very far out of date. There are aspects of
the document though that may change before we do a final release. To
understand these, you'll probably need to attend the teleconference.
Contact details for that are sent out on the JSDL mailing list (which
this message is cc'ed to) and can be looked up in the archive of the 
mailing list on the JSDL website.
http://www-unix.gridforum.org/mail_archive/jsdl-wg/threads.html

Donal.