CCLRC Portal infrastructure to support research facilities

Abstract

The emergence of portal technology is providing benefits in developing portlet interfaces to applications to meet the current and future requirements of CCLRC facilities support. Portlets can be reused by different projects, e.g. the high-profile Integrative Biology project (with the University of Oxford), and in different Java Specification Request 168 Portlet Specification (JSR 168) compliant portal frameworks. Deployment and maintenance of applications developed as portlets becomes easier and manageable. A community process is already beginning and many portal frameworks come with free-to-use useful portlets. As rendering is carried out in the framework, applications can be easily accessible and internationalized. Portlets are compatible with J2EE, thus providing additional capabilities required in the service-oriented architecture (SOA). We also describe how Web service gateways can be used to provide many of the functionalities encapsulated in a portal server in a way to support Grid applications. Portals used as a rich client can allow users to customize or personalize their user interfaces and even their workflow and application access. CCLRC facilities will be able to leverage the work so far carried out on the National Grid Service (NGS) and e-HTPX portals, as they are fully functional and have received detailed user feedback. This demonstrates the usefulness of providing advanced capabilities for e-Research and having the associated business logic in a SOA loosely coupled from the presentation layer for an Integrated e-Science Environment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.