[ogsa-hpcp-wg] Application Templates

[Donal K. Fellows]

Steven Newhouse wrote:
> At the last call I mentioned the notion of an Application Template. A
> first draft is now on Gridforge -
> https://forge.gridforum.org/sf/docman/do/downloadDocument/projects.ogsa-hpcp-wg/docman.root.drafts.application_template/doc15034

Thanks for doing this. Some comments since I can't make the call:

Re the Application URI:
   What are the correspondences between the APPLICATION and VERSION parts
   and the general JSDL document? And Glue's ApplicationEnvironment? And
   the relevant bits of CIM? (OK, I can't be bothered to look up the name
   of the last part, but I think that corresponding to JSDL and Glue lets
   you pick up on this stuff for free.)

   The ORGANIZATION part seems odd; is it the service provider or the
   software provider that it corresponds to? If the former, does that
   mean we cannot compare application URIs from different providers?

Re Discovery:
   Should there be a way for users to look up the templates as opposed to
   just their names?

Re Invocation:
   I can't see how you can match/override arguments in general; there's
   no mechanism for determining if they "mean overlapping things" and
   I've seen some deeply odd argument syntaxes. Instead, I think the only
   thing you can do in the simple case is to append the user-supplied
   arguments to the template-supplied ones. Quick and dirty, yes, but
   will do 99% of the trick for 1% of the effort. :-)

   I'm tempted to say that templates should not specify the Username at
   all. Rationale: the template author probably won't know which user is
   using the application when writing it, and specifying a wrong value is
   likely to lead to much more grief than utility.

General comments.

It would be nice if templates could support named replacement parts.
I've seen this hacked together with environment variables (with the
emphasis on "hacked") but it would be nice if something like this could
be supported more directly. But maybe not in this profile, since it
*requires* a more complex discovery process.

If we're publishing the actual templates (as opposed to their URIs), it
would also be nice if we could attach extra metadata to the templates
which would be for consumption by processing entities other than the BES
container. (For example: provenance of the template, usage advice, even
an XForms GUI for filling out JSDL to use the template...)

Donal.