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Portal Technologies

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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. And 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 use cases. Several NGIs, user communities and projects of EGI offer portals or reusable "portal builder technologies" for end users and for portal developers. With such a diversity it becomes difficult to make a decision on which technology to use. Which portal or portal builder technology should I use? During the last EGI Technical Forum the User and Community Support Team of EGI.eu organized a topical workshop on portal technologies and tried to answer that question. An important outcome of the workshop was an agreement to create a "portal technology comparison table" for EGI. The table aims to provide an analysis of existing and reusable portals, portal developer frameworks, portlets and components to help scientific communities and their supporting NGIs identify solutions that best meet their needs and should be considered when building and using portals.

The survey to collect feedback on the available technologies can be found here (put link to zoomerang once reviewed).

Questions

EGI.eu drafted a set of questions to collect information about existing portal technology solutions and to make a comparison. These questions were reviewed by the three main groups of people who participated in the topical workshop on portal technologies, namely:

  • software developers who produce reusable components for portal development.
  • providers of portal services: both software based services (the portals themselves) and human services (such as consultancy and training)
  • scientific communities who require and/or already use portals to interact with the e-Infrastructure

The survey (put link to zoomerang once survey is reviewed) is composed of two sections which collect basic and more detailed information about the technology. You can find the question below:

Basic information

1. Name of the technology (Lifera, P-GRADE Portal,  Other)

2. Webpage of the technology.

3. The described technology is:

* a complete portal (can be used “as it is”, its features cannot be customised)

* a portal framework (can be used “as it is”, and additionally features can be added, removed, changed)

* a portal component (for example a portlet, or a library for portal developers)
Detailed information

4. Is the technology open source? Under what license?

5. Who are the potential users of the technology and what kind of skills do they need to have? (e.g., which programming language skills are needed if the technology is for portal developers)

6. What are the key features of the technology? (e.g., list of portlets in case of a complete portal)

7. What are the distinguished features of the technology? (features that make this technology different from similar solutions)

8. Which EGI services are accessible through the technology? (e.g., middleware services - gLite, ARC, Globus, Unicore; other services like a Helpdesk, a Requirements tracker, etc.)

9. What is the supported security model and technology?

10. Does the portal support workflow execution? If yes, for which workflow system?

11. Is the technology available for download, or is it hosted as a service? 



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: Downloadable
  • Complete portal : Pylons
  • Portal framework : Dirac and robot certificate APIs
Open source (GPL) n.a. Portal developers
  • python
  • web portal development
  • grid accounting
  • grid admin
  • system admin
  • Pylons
    • open source Web application framework written in Python.
    • extensively use of the Web Server Gateway Interface standard to promote reusability and to separate functionality into distinct modules.
  • Robot certificate API
    • extracts proxy certificate from Aladdin etoken key
  • DIRAC
    • manages workload and data in a distributed computing environment
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.

MaxOcc, Antechamber, AnisoFIT, Xplor-NIH, AMPS-NMR

Drupal Downloadable Portal framework Open source (GPL) n.a.
  • webdevelopers
  • webdesigners
  • site managers
  • Essential for developers
    • Programing languages (PHP, HTML, CSS)
    • SQL database management are essential for developers.
  • For specific applications
    • Javascript
    • jQuery
WeNMR science gateway
VisIVOWeb

HADDOCK, CS-ROSETTA, 3D-DART, GROMACS, UNIO

CYANA, MARS, MDD-NMR, UPLABEL