technology update on gridsphere

Albert Einstein Institut (MPG)

Technology Update on GridSphere

Jason Novotny ([email protected])Oliver Wehrens ([email protected])

Michael Russell ([email protected])

Jason Novotny([email protected]),, 06/5/2006

Agenda

Past, Present & FutureGridSphere FeaturesTechnologies


Past, Present & Future


The GridSphere Portal

Originally funded by the EU GridLab project spanning 3 years since 2002Overall goal to build the best open source standards compliant portal designed to meet the needs of the Grid communityBringing together best of breed technologies from both web and grid worldBuilding a community of users and developers and continuing to add new exciting scenarios


How it all started...

Think back to 2002…Early Grid Portal projects: Grid Portal Development Kit, HotPage, Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory GPDK and HotPage received significant attention as early interfaces to the Grid

Introducing Web Portals and portlet conceptJetspeed 1 early portal demonstrating power and concept of portletsCommercial application vendors providing in-house portlet-like solutions

No real standards and landscape was quickly evolving….


A few key milestones...

Spring 2002: Completed design document and analysis of existing portal / grid solutionsAugust 2002: Wrote the first line of codeDecember 2002: Functional portal prototype using Portlet API borrowed from IBM WebSphere API2003: GridSphere evolves into highly functional portal complete with core set of portlets, sophisticated service model and visual tag libraryJanuary 2004: JSR 168 Portlet API implementationFebruary 2004: GS appears in IBM developerWorks articleMarch 2004: GS passes Sun Technology Compatibility KitNovember 2004: OGCE is JSR 168 compliant and can be dropped into GridSphere portal demonstrating true interoperability!December 2005: We are part of the Expert Group for the next Portlet specification (JSR 286)


Community

250+ subscribers to the mailinglistMany Project around the world adopted it

HPC Europa, D-Grid, P-Grade, BIRN, Telescience, Australian Virtual Observatory, UK E-Science ...

Help from many countriese.g. we got localization in chinese, arabic and japanese and code contributions for GT 4

Lots of workshop/talksUK E-Science workshops, APAC workshop Gold Coast, GGF Brussels/Seoul , Supercomputing, Portal workshops in Baton Rouge, Edinburgh and San Diego ... Next workshops: July, Portals and Portlets 2006 Edinburgh UK, November GCE 2006 at Supercomputing Tampa USA


Source Code

Website: http://www.gridsphere.orgIncludes documentation, news, partners

Subversion: http://svn.gridsphere.orgAll code is now in subversion, free access

Bugtracker: http://bugs.gridsphere.orgJira bugtracking system

Mailinglistshttps://www.gridlab.org/mailman/listinfo/gridsphere-devhttps://www.gridlab.org/mailman/listinfo/gridsphere-users


Current Funding

Core developers now have their own teamsJason Novotny leading the BIRN portal team at SDSU, USAMichael Russell leading the Portal Efforts at PSNC in Poland (including HPC Europa, OMII)Oliver Wehrens leading the development of portals within the german national D-Grid initiative, also member of the portal team at Center for Computation and Technology (CCT), Louisiana State University, USA


Biomedical Information Research Network

Goal: Enable new understanding of neurological disease by integrating data across multiple scales from macroscopic brain function to its molecular and cellular underpinningsMigrating from Perl to GridSphereProtected content will be available w/ single sign on.

160+ public pages600~ protected pages

Collaboration Work SpaceUser Information ManagementEnhanced Project ManagementCollaboration Tools

Using technnologies like GAMA, Myproxy, SRB


Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

GGF InvolvementCo-founded European Grid Forum which later lead to GGFCo-founded Grid Scheduling Architecture Research GroupInvolved in Simple Application Grid API (SAGA) Working Group

Gridge Toolkit, includes...GridSphere Grid Resource Management System (GRMS)Grid Authorization Service (GAS)

Current EU ProjectsBeInGrid, HPC-Europa, InteliGrid, OMII-Europe, BREIN, QoSCosGrid...


D-Grid

Many german research institutions participated in various Grid projectsNational Grid initiative were started by many countries In 2005 the german government funded an e-Science project covering

Grid computingKnowledge managemente-Learning


D-Grid (cont)

Project is funded in the first phase till 2008Several communities are part of the Grid Computing division

AstronomyClimateEngineeringLife ScienceHigh Energy Physics

The ‘Integration project’ provides knowledge and help to the communities GridSphere was choosen to be the portal platform for all these communities


Features


What does it look like?


Easy to customize

In self defined Tabs a user can organize the portlets he wants to have1/2/3 column predefined layout is availableAdministrator can add more flexible layouts


... and themable.


GridSphere Features

Portlet API passed Sun TCK and is 100% JSR 168 compliantAdditional Portlet API implementation nearly fully compatible with IBM's WebSphere 4.2.Support for the easy development and integration of new portlet applicationsHigher-level model for building complex portlets using visual beans and the GridSphere User Interface (UI) tag library.Flexible XML based portal presentation description can be easily modified to create customized portal layouts.


GridSphere Features (II)

Built-in support for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) separating users into guests, users, admins and super users.Sophisticated portlet service model that allows for creation and reusability of new business logic with support for persistence of dataSupport for Spring FrameworkPersistence of data provided using Hibernate for database support


GridSphere Features (III)

Portlet Bridge support (Struts, JSF)Profile personalization and Layout customizationAdministration portlets for creation of users, groups, portlet management and portal layout customizationLocalization support in the Portlet API implementation and portlets support French, English, German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Italian. And now Arabic, Chinese, Japanese as well Open-source and 100% free! :-)


GridSphere Portal Framework

The primary goal of the GridSphere Project is to develop a Grid portal framework that we call GridSphere Grid Portal. GridSphere Portal Framework is a JSR-168 compliant portlet container that offers a set of core portlets that provide the base functionality we think is required for all Web portals.It also provides a framework for developing and packaging portlets as well as additional libraries to make portlet development easier


GridSphere Grid Portlets

The GridSphere Portal Framework is a portlet container which is designed to be web application independent. Indeed, one of the key advantages of the Portlet API is the reuse of web applications.Thus, the GridSphere Portal Framework does not contain any support for using Grid technologies.Instead, GridSphere’s Grid related functionality is contained in a web application we call Grid Portlets.GridSphere Grid Portlets, together with the GridSphere Portal Framework, offers a generic Grid portal and can be used to develop application-specific Grid portal applications.


Technologies


Questionnaire

We did a questionnaire end of last yearSpring Framework supportJava Server Faces supportMore complex examples, tutorialsEasier authenticationMore portlets with GridSphere (Wiki, CMS, ... )Support for more (Grid) Middleware (Unicore, LSF, PBS, Condor...)Support for more Application Servers (Weblogic, Websphere)Struts, Tapestry supportIDE Support (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA)

We work and will work on the feature request, we are committed to make this the best grid portal toolkit


What is AJAX?Asynchronous Javascript and XML(coined 2005)Makes use of XMLHttpRequest object in modern browsers to fetch data w/o page refreshRelies on Javascript/CSS/DOM


Why use AJAX?

No need to refresh entire page in many situations-- saves timeFunctionality like auto complete (Google Suggest) or form validation can be made much more responsive enhancing usabilityDOM manipulation allows websites to offer more of a “desktop” environment “drag and drop”, progress bars, etc.


GridSphere + AJAX

Current issues with portlet developmentNo standard to add external CSS No standard to add external JavaScriptNo standard for how to reference a portlet in the DOM2 main usage scenarios:Portlet developers could themselves use AJAX to create more dynamic and responsive portletsGridSphere could use AJAX to dynamically update portlet without refreshing entire portal page


AJAX enabled portlets (1)

1st use case (portlet developer uses AJAX)GS provides proprietary mechanisms to include CSS and JSUses renderResponse.setProperty(…) method of JSR 168 Portlet API

CSS_HREF - sets an external CSS stylesheet to add to page headerJAVASCRIPT_SRC - sets external javascript libraries to be includedBODY_ONLOAD - allows javascript methods to be included as onload attribute to HTML body tag


AJAX enabled portlets (2)

2nd case (GS uses AJAX behind the scenes)Using UI actionlink and actionsubmit tags, boolean attribute “useAjax” is providedAdd tag to JSP code e.g:

This results in action being triggered in portlet, and only markup for portlet is returnedXMLHttpRequest is used to return markup fragment and DOM handling inserts modified markup

<ui:actionlink action=“myAction” useAjax=“true”>Hi there</ui:actionlink>


New UI widgets

Javascript provides more interactive client side capabilitiesDownside is that code can be nasty to debug and issues with browser versions remainSolution: Wrap into UI tags!Example components that use JS:

SliderProgress bar Color chooser Tree menus Calendar Rich editorsetc.


Calendar Widget

Uses Simple Calendar Widget: http://www.garrett.nildram.co.uk/calendar/scw.htmTag usage example:

Date can be retrieved in portlet code:

<ui:calendar beanId="myCal"/>

CalendarBean myCal = event.getCalendarBean(“myCal”);String date = myCal.getDate();

Works in IE and Firefox, Safari coming soon!


Text Editor widget

Provides rich text editor with standard featuresUsage similar to CalendarTag:

Works in Firefox and IE 6+

<ui:texteditor beanId="myTE"/>

TextEditorBean myCal = event.getTextEditorBean(“myTE”);String richtext = myTE.getValue();


Portlet Tag

Portlets are normally added to layout descriptor

How can we add portlets to a legacy website?May not want use GridSphere layout/look and feelMay want to just simply add a portlet to a website (non-portal)

<portlet-tab label="helloportlet"> <title lang="en">Hello</title> <table-layout> <row-layout> <column-layout width="50%"> <portlet-frame> <portlet-class> jsrtutorial#ActionHelloPortlet </portlet-class> </portlet-frame> </column-layout>


Portlet Tag (cont.)

Answer: The UI Portlet Tag!Can be used in any legacy JSP page

Label used for linking, bookmarkingPortletId uses GS convention for portlet naming i.e. <webapp name>#<portlet name>

<%@ taglib uri="/portletUI" prefix="ui" %><%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/portlet" prefix="portlet" %><%@ taglib uri="/portletAPI" prefix="portletAPI" %>

<portletAPI:init/>

<ui:portlet label=”mylabel" portletId="demo#AnyPortlet"/>


GridSphere 2.x

Final GridSphere 2.2 release will containTracking statistics for clicks on portletsSpanish localeNew widgets for UI tag lib, like TextEditorWidget and CalendarWidgetCertificate login for portalFixed some CSS bugsAJAX support for rendering only selected layout componentsImproved DB performance using EHcache libraryImproved role/group managementAdministrators can confirm user self generated accounts


GridSphere 3.0

Scheduled for release in Summer 2006LicenseAPI changesCustomization changesJSR 286New portletsImproved CSS SupportImproved documentation


License

GridSphere Portal Framework and GridPortlets used to have the GridSphere Open License (GOL)This was basically just the Globus License Some people asked why we do not have a recognized licenseWe are switching to Apace 2.0 license with the next major releaseBasically: You can use GridSphere for anything you want, you just have to include the license


API changes

We will deprecate the old IBM Websphere portlet APIWe encourage everybody to use JSR 168/286 portlet APIRefactoring of the namespace (org.gridlab.gridsphere to org.gridsphere)

This will cause a need to reimport the correct classes in the portlets (your IDE can do that)

Some changes in internal classes


Customization

Easier customization of the portlet urlBetter css support

More themesMore colorsMore flexible

A Guide for customization


JSR 286

We are part of the Expert Group JSR 286The first public draft is expected in may (now)The final specification is expected to be done in Jan 2007We will work as soon as possible to get GridSphere JSR 286 compliantEarly versions might be in SVN by the time the first public release is out (depending on the policy of the JCP)


New portlets

We do not have any ‘extra’ portlet besides the core ones in GridSphereThis allows us to have a clear focus on the core frameworkWe might have an separate portlet package with additional portlets in the futureThose can contain a wiki or a notebook portletThis is not decided yet and depends on user requirements


Documentation

Will improve documentationWriting on a guide with a full portlet coding exampleExplanation of some questions we see on the mailinglistsRedo the Administrators and Users GuideWork has been started on that already


Open

We are always open to new suggestions

New featuresImprovementsCode contributionBugreports ;-)Ideas

Contact me Jason Novotny [email protected]

technology update on gridsphere

Documents

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grid world

early grid portal projects

grid portal development

portal workshops

early portal

portal efforts