CyberWeb

From Advanced Computing Environments Lab

Development of Grid Enabled Web Applications for Science Gateways and Cyberinfrastructure

Overview

Science Web services, portals and gateways are built using a variety of tools ranging from elementary customized tools to existing frameworks that bring both greater capabilities (authentication, account management, interfaces, logging) and more complexity (resulting in long learning curves and complex code bases). For gateways, it is important to identify frameworks that can be easily adapted to the specialized environments needed for accessing the required cyberinfrastructure.

In this research we are developing a grid-enabled Web app framework, the Cyberinfrastructure Web Application (CyberWeb) Tookit, using the Pylons Web Framework, Python tools, the Globus Core Python Toolkit including pyWSRF (Web Services-Resource Framework) and pyGlobus, developing Web service clients to TeraGrid information services, and Google code tools.

The Pylons Web framework, which utilizes WSGI (WS-Gateway Interface) and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is easy to use and learn, is very flexible and has the ability to dynamically reload services without restarting the server (which dramatically reduces development and testing time). Additionally, Pylons components can be published as services, widgets and gadgets, and desktop applications.