Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Many web and desktop-based tools have been developed in the past few years
that have been labelled as science gateways. However, close examination of these
tools reveals that the level of granularity at which end-users can access the appli-
cations is rather varied. There are solutions which do not aim to hide the details of
the original command line interface, and simply provide web-based access to the
underlying distributed computing infrastructure. On the other extreme, there are
custom-built portals supporting a single or a small family of applications and
providing highly intuitive graphical user interfaces incorporating visualization
tools, for example. Science gateways can be developed at various levels of gran-
ularity, signi
cantly influencing how and by which category of users these tools can
be utilized.
Part of the research carried out in the SCI-BUS European project was to
investigate the level of granularity of science gateways that a particular user
community requires. As the WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework supports the devel-
opment of science gateways at different levels of granularity, once the required level
was identi
ed, SCI-BUS supported the development of various end-user gateways
in diverse disciplines and at the required granularity levels. This chapter gives an
overview of the various granularity levels offered by WS-PGRADE/gUSE, and
illustrates via the example of a molecular docking gateway (Kiss 2010) the
advantages and disadvantages of the different levels and approaches.
8.2 Granularity Levels Supported by WS-PGRADE/gUSE
There are two main approaches when developing science gateways: developing
from scratch or adapting and customizing an existing gateway framework.
When developed from scratch, software engineers create a custom gateway
solution for a particular user community with no or minimal reuse of existing
components. This can result in a highly customized and specialized gateway. On
the other hand, development
cant time, effort, and
resources. Also, these gateways are typically highly specialized, making it hard to
reuse and extend them for additional user scenarios. Changing the level of granu-
larity in case of these custom gateways is not supported since any modi
typically requires signi
cation of
the developed solution requires major software engineering effort.
The second approach to building a science gateway is to adapt and customize a
generic science gateway framework. These frameworks (for example, WS-PGRADE/
gUSE (Kacsuk 2012), the Catania Science Gateway Framework (Barbera 2010), or
the HubZero framework (McLennan 2010)) provide readily available services,
signi
cantly decreasing development time and effort. Additionally, if these frame-
works were extended with customization methodologies then highly speci
c gate-
ways could also be built on top of them. Therefore, gateways at different levels of
granularity can be created requiring various levels of effort from the developers, and
providing various levels of customization for end-users.
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