R e D R e S S Portals, Desktop Applications and Distributed Services for e-Research - Updated vision - Rob Crouchley and Rob Allan With thanks to Chuck Severance Sakai VRE Demonstrator – progress July’05

R e D R e S S The original Vision

R e D R e S S PLREs and All That! The Personal Learning/ Research Environment (PLRE) effectively adds a “productivity” layer to the VLE/VRE/IE space which unifies the look/feel/usability across the multiple sources of information Requirements VLE VRE IE Vision following the JISC-CETIS workshop in Oxford presented by Chuck Severance

R e D R e S S Someday the PLRE will not be just a browser a. pure HTML Web page b. Web page based, but with browser enhancements c. browser extension d. dedicated desktop network client e. extensible desktop application platform f. common desktop application Desktop Apps have: Better user experience Increased productivity But: More complex to build Difficult to keep up with changing technology

R e D R e S S E-Research Framework Choices now Portal Software: –uPortal, GridSphere, Liferay, StringBeans, Jetspeed2, JBOSS, eXo Platform We are evaluating these in a collaboration with Jason Novotny and will produce a technical report JSR-168 portlets have been demonstrated to be portable between frameworks –.NET not yet evaluated Digital Repository Software: –Fedora, DSpace, Plone Collaborative Software: –Sakai, Sharepoint, NaradaBroker, Lotus Notes, OpenOffice ? Web Services and loose coupling are helping us to realise the vision.

R e D R e S S Linking Sakai to the Desktop Work by Chuck Severance (Michigan) using Visual Basic. July 2005.

R e D R e S S Consuming Web Services Text Field to enter WSDL location Drop Down Menu for Services & Operations Buttons to Analyse and Add WS JTree for adding WS, with user interaction Display Message content for WS Operation Call Work by Asif Akram (Daresbury) using Swing. June 2005.

R e D R e S S

Dynamic Swing Form created for testing WS Prototype can handle very complex and composite data types

R e D R e S S Adding Different WS and SOAP Message Different WS added and populated drop down menu Contents of SOAP Method Call

R e D R e S S Extending the Authentication Framework Add Francisco’s Shibboleth picture.

R e D R e S S New Vision Common Services SOAP, WSDL, UDDI Portlet Service JSR-168, WSRP Common Services

R e D R e S S Sakai tool HTTP WSRP Portal Sakai tool HTTP Sakai tool HTTP Non-Sakai Non-Java Tools tool WSRP Non-Sakai Tool WSRP Same view from Sakai!

R e D R e S S So what tools are we working with? Sakai Collaboration Tools Schedule Resources Web Content Chat Discussion New Sakai Tools LDQ Upload Whiteboard CopperCore IRC Wiki CREE Information Management Tools JAFER GetRef HEIRPORT Google Grid Tools Grid Job monitor MDS LDAP Browser Grid Proxy Manager Grid Job Submission Grid FTP InfoPortal Grid Markets Tools Negociation Client Payment Service Client Data Management Tools SRB OGSA-DAI Service Registry UDDI publish UDDI discovery Dynamic WSDL Interface Support Tools Certificate Upload Desktop FTP

R e D R e S S Community, Evaluation and Support Methodology: 1.Collaboration tools and Sakai work sites for sharing of resources; 2.Development and evaluation of portlet-based tools linking to an SOA; 3.Portlets and framework extensions linked with Sakai. Deployment: IBM BladeCenter server at DL with Oracle 9i on NGS node at RAL. Development systems at all sites. Community: 1.GROWL; Sakai VRE; CQeSS; NWGrid Tech Board; NWGrid Ops Board; ReDRESS Steering Committee; 2.NGS portal; Integrative Biology; 3.ReDRESS portal developers; WSRP and portal framework evaluations; 4.(Inter)national links to GridSphere, Sakai and CREE.

R e D R e S S Thanks to: The people who are actually doing the work: Lancaster: –Adrian Fish and Miguel Gonzalez Daresbury: –Xiaobo Yang with input from Xiao Dong Wang, Dharmesh Chohan and Asif Akram Oxford: –Francisco Pinto Portsmouth: –Mark Baker