GCube Presentation Services

The gCube Presentation services form the logical top layer of a gCube-powered infrastructure. Their objective is twofold:

• To provide the means to build user interfaces for interacting with and exploiting the gCube system and infrastructure.
• To provide a full range of user interfaces for achieving interaction with the system, out-of-the-box.

The gCube presentation layer is based on the Application Support Layer (ASL), which is a framework that abstracts the complexity of the underlying infrastructure so that the front-end developer focuses on the objectives of presentation rather the details of the protocols and rules for interacting with the underlying (WSRF) services. The ASL exposes to the developer well known tools as session and credential management and is accessible through various interfaces (currently HTTP and JAVA-native).

On top of the ASL the developer can develop the user interface components needed for a particular application, depending on the execution environment that will host them (e.g. php web server, desktop application, application server etc).

The execution environment is normally provided by existing systems and can be powered by bare Operating Systems / Virtual Machines (e.g. desktop applications), plain html pages, dynamic web-sites (php, asp, jsp etc), portals, application servers etc.

gCube presentation layer, offers an initial set of components currently running under the JRS168 [28] specification, hosted by GridSphere portlet container, while, apart from gCube core services, it is based on Java and servlets technologies for offering it services. These components, which are called “portlets”, and cover end-user and administrative functionalities.