Developer's Guide: Introduction
Contents
Overview
Welcome to the gCube's Developers Guide. The purpose of this document is to provide instructions for developers wishing to exploit a gCube based grid infrastructure. gCube is a versatile, rich featured grid platform that has been developed in the context of the D4Science European IST research project [1].
The platform follows the Service Oriented paradigm and exploits and extends various existing grid middlewares and collaborative tools like the Globus Toolkit 4 [2], gLite [3], the GridSphere Portal Framework [4], etc. gCube offers a feature full platform for distributed hosting, management and retrieval of data and information, and a framework for extending state-of-the-art indexing, selection, fusion, extraction, description, annotation, transformation, and presentation of content.
Intended Readership
The document targets two classes of programmers:
- Those who want to reuse the code – Programmers who will use gCube’s libraries to build their own services and middleware components, without need to access the source code.
- Those who want to modify/extend the source code – Programmers who will use the platforms source code to enhance it, correct it, adapt it to different environments and applications domains.
Related Documents
Apart from this Developers Guide, D4Science has also made available two additional support documents:
- the User's Guide, which provides usage information and guidelines for the end-user.
- the Administrator's Guide, which provides information and guidelines for the installation, configuration and daily administration of a gCube based computational grid infrastructure.
Additional material that will help potential gCube developers is the
Regarding the architecture and inner details of gCube, the interested reader can visit the official gCube platform web site [7].
Lexical Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used extensively throughout the document:
| ABE | Annotation Back End |
| ADL | Advanced Distributed Learning |
| AFE | Annotation Front End |
| AIS | Archive Import Service |
| API | Application Programming Interface |
| ASL | Application Support Layer |
| BM | Broker and Matchmaker |
| BPEL | Business Process Execution Language |
| CE | Computing Element |
| CMS | Content Management Service |
| CORI | Collection Retrieval Inference Network |
| CS | Compound Service |
| D4Science | DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology 4 Science |
| DIR | Distributed Information Retrieval |
| DPM | Disk Pool Manager |
| DTS | Data Transformation Service |
| EC | European Commission |
| EPR | EndPoint Reference |
| gCF | gCube Core Framework |
| GFAL | Grid File Access Library |
| gHN | gCube |
| GPL | General Public Licence |
| GUI | Graphical User Interface |
| GUID | Global Unique Identifier |
| GWT | Google Web Toolkit |
| IO | Input / Output |
| IR | Information Retrieval |
| IS | Information Service |
| JDBM | Java DataBase Manager |
| JSP | Java Server Pages |
| JSR | Java Specification Request |
| LGPL | Lesser General Public Licence |
| LMS | Learning Management System |
| MD5 | Message-Digest algorithm 5 |
| OASIS | Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards |
| PES | Process Execution Service |
| POS | Process Optimisation Service |
| SCORM | Shareable Content Object Reference Model |
| SE | Storage Element |
| SRM | Storage Resource Manager |
| URI | Uniform Resource Identifier |
| URL | Uniform Resource Locator |
| VO | Virtual Organisation |
| VOMS | Virtual Organisation Membership Service |
| VRE | Virtual Research Environment |
| WS | Web Service |
| WSRF | Web Service Resource Framework |
| XENA | eXecution ENgine API |
| XSL | XML Stylesheet Language |
| XSLT | XSL Transformations |
Problem Reporting
For problem reporting or any other enquiries regarding this document please contact the Support Team (support
d4science.research-infrastructures.eu).
