Portal Technologies
Introduction
Empowering scientific communities with tools that enable them to make use of European Grid Infrastructure services is important for the successful engagement of EGI with new users. Portal technologies play an important role within this respect.
Portals can eliminate barriers of e-Infrastructure access, portals can seamlessly integrate the grid and the web. Because of their strong relation to users, portals are typically geared to specific users, applications, scientific use cases. Several national and community-specific teams and projects offer portals and/or "portal builder technologies" in EGI. With such a diversity it becomes difficult to make a decision on which portal to user if you are a user, builder technology to consider if you are a portal developer.
EGI responded to this need with the setup of the below "portal technology comparison table". The table provides a review of existing and reusable portals, portal developer frameworks, portlets and components that exist within EGI. The table aims to help scientific communities and their software teams identify solutions that best meet their needs and should be considered when accessing or building portals."
The questions that are used within the table to present and compate the technologies have been defined through an open process within EGI during December 2011 - January 2012.
Adding information to the table
New entries can be added to the table by submitting the data about the portal technology to the EGI.eu User Community Support Team through this [LINK online survey]. The survey consists of two sections which collect basic and more detailed information about the technology to be added to the table. [LINK This page] shows the survey questions.
EGI Portal Technology Comparison Table
The collected info is displayed in the following table.
Technology name | Technology availability | Portal category | Software license | Security model | Target audience | Skills | Features | Key features | EGI services available | Workflow support | Science gateway/Portal examples |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bundle of:
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Downloadable |
|
Open source (GPL) | n.a. | Portal developers |
|
|
This allows the direcPylons is a Python web framework.t integration of all in-house/community python bioinformatics scripts.
Dirac API use Pylons. |
WMS, Storage Elements, VOMS, myproxy | n.a. | |
Drupal | Downloadable | Portal framework | Open source (GPL) | n.a. |
|
|
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One of the most useful and used frameworks for community websites. |
|
n.a. | WeNMR science gateway |
WS-PGRADE Portal | Hosted as a service | Complete portal | Open source (GPL) | n.a. | Researchers that want to create images and movies with own dataset | Portlet based | iPhone/Smartphone application linked to the portlet (in progress) | Middleware | n.a. | VisIVOWeb | |
|
Hosted as a service. Although the Python based validation component of the HADDOCK, CS-ROSETTA, UNIO and GROMACS portals is available as framework and can be downloaded. | Complete portal | Open source | n.a. | All portals are developed with common programming languages without specific frameworks apart from the Spyder python framework for data validation. | The list of automated grid submission and polling scripts used behind the portals is available here | Simplicity – combination of mainly python and shell scripting | gLite WMS and LB | n.a. | ||
|
Hosted as a service | Complete portal | Open source. A valid license is needed for the use of one of the software portals (CYANA). | n.a. | Python-CGI, shell script and HTML | The list of automated grid submission and polling scripts used behind the portals is available here | Simplicity – combination of mainly python and shell scripting | gLite WMS and LB | n.a. |