The GridSphere Project

The primary goals of our project are to develop a standards based portlet framework for building web portals,which we call GridSphere, and a set of portlet web applications that work seemlessly with the GridSphere framework to provide a complete Grid portal development solution. Our project is a part of a larger collaboration,consisting of several institutions from around the world. Although several other open source portals are available,we have made grid computing our niche and the integration of the GridSphere portal framework with the collectionof gridportlets provided as an add-on module forms a cohesive "grid portal" end-user environment for managing users, groupsand supporting remote job execution, file staging and providing access to information services. Grid security based on public key infrastructure (PKI) and emerging IETF and OASIS standards is central to our work.
Information on GridSphere funding

GridSphere

GridSphere provides an implementation of the JSR 168 portlet API standard. GridSphere supports the development of re-usable portlets and portlet services. It includes a set of core portlets and portlet services that providethe basic infrastructure required for developing and administering Web portals. A key feature of the design of GridSphere is that it builds upon the web application repository (WAR) deployment model to support third-party portlet web applications. In this way, portlet developers can easily distribute and share their work with other portal projects that use GridSphere to support their portal development.

GridPortlets

Another key goal of our project is to develop a Grid porlet web application to allow end-users to make use of Grid technologies. The GridPortlets web application will enable users to upload their Grid credentials and usethem to gain access to a variety of Grid services. Furthermore, in collaboration with other work packages withGridLab, we're developing portlets for administering virtual organizations and managing Grid resources. Moreover,the GridPortlet web application will contain reusable portlet service interfaces that can support differentimplementations depending on the Grid technologies developers require to support their project requirements.

Community Involvement

In order to achieve our goals, we feel it's important to get input from the portal community. First of all, we hope that the GridSphere framework will allow developers to quickly develop and deploy portals.Moreover, we hope developers will be able to exchange portlet web applications, thereby enabling developers from many projects and institutions to collaborate towards building more robust portals. Finally, we hope to get feedback which we incorporate into building a better framework.

Evolution of Standards

The success of proposed standards like the Portlet JSR are critical to the success of GridSphere and directly benefits all software projects that adopt those standards. Through collaborations like the Global Grid Forum,we are helping to mobilize the Grid community towards adopting the Portlet API (JSR 168). Our ultimate aim is to make it possible to share portlet web applications among any portlet implementations. Whether it's JetSpeed or GridSphere, developers should be able to package their portlet Web applications to run in any portlet container with minimal effort.