Transcript Portals and Portlets Marlon Pierce Community Grids Lab Indiana University September 27, 2004 What a Science Portal Is/Is Not  It is • A tool for aggregating.

Portals and Portlets
Marlon Pierce
Community Grids Lab
Indiana University
September 27, 2004
What a Science Portal Is/Is Not
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It is
• A tool for aggregating and managing web content
• A user customizable view of these Web content pieces.
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You see what you want/can see.
But you must log in.
The portal recognizes you.
• Implemented on top of standard services
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Like login, authorization, customization.
May include collaboration, etc, that depend on login.
• A way to accomplish tasks through browsers:
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Launch, monitor jobs
Move files
Run science applications based on these services.
• Compatible with emerging standards and best practices (such
as portlets, JSR 168 and WSRP).
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It is not (just)
• A web page
• A collection of links
• An applet
Things I Hate About Portals
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If you involved in portal efforts, be aware of the following:
Browsers have limited interactivity.
• Desktop GUIs provide much better interactivity but have other
problems.
• Applets are a solution, but they don’t interact with other parts of the
browser very well.
• Solution: Service Oriented portals let you use services through both
portals and grid desktops.
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Developing really useful user interfaces to your set of services is a
time consuming, non-scaling process.
• Get users involved early in design.
• If you can get users directly involved, even better.
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Browsers notoriously have incompatible features.
• Things don’t work the same on IE, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc.
• Same browsers on Macs, Windows don’t work the same.
• No substitute for lots of testing.
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Portals depend upon backend resources and security
• But these things are not under portal developers’ control.
• When things change (and they do, constantly) things will break.
• You will be blamed.
Interoperable Portal
Services (ET-03-011)
Marlon Pierce
Community Grids Lab
Indiana University
What 3rd Party Technologies Did
We Use?
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Tomcat 3.x and 4.x, Jetspeed 1.4,
JSP 2.x, JavaBeans, Apache Axis 1.x
We also used kerberized CORBA in
previous projects
• Unfashionable these days
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If I were starting today, I would use
• Gridsphere (for JSR168), JavaServer
Faces, Apache Axis, NaradaBrokering
Project: ET011
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Goals of the project are to demonstrate
interoperability between Portal/PSE
projects
• Mary Thomas (PI), TACC: HotPage
• Tomasz Haupt, MSU: DMEFS
• Marlon Pierce, IU: Gateway
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We investigated building interoperability at
two levels:
• Web services provide standard interfaces
• Portlets provide component-based interfaces
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I was responsible for deployment at ASC
and ARL.
Project ended Oct 1, 2003.
Portal Security
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We are building off
Gateway’s approach for
Web-based security for
DOD portals.
Browser
HTTPS
• Approved for ARL and ASC
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Users kinit to a web server
to get a ticket.
• SSL, MD’d sessions,
Certificates maintain
secure connection.
• Web server typically
located in “DMZ”
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Web server manages
session IDs, invokes
backend requests with
Kerberos client utilities.
Probably would break
today.
DMZ
Web
Server
krcp, krsh
HPC
HPC
HPC
Portlets and Containers
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One of the problems of previous portal
development is that there is no good way
to share interface components.
• How do developers share web interfaces?
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Also, how can we avoid constantly
reinventing things like login services,
customization services, page organization,
access controls.
Answer: use portlets and containers.
• Becoming a recognized best practice for portal
development because it enables distributed
portal development.
What Is a Portlet?
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A portlet is a piece of Java code that runs in a
Web server inside a container servlet.
Portlets can do two things:
• Perform non-visual operations such as make connections
to remote hosts, perform operations.
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Example: get a list of local files.
• Create their display
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The portlet passes its display to its parent, which
is responsible for constructing the entire display.
• Typically this is HTML, with tables uses to organize
component displays.
• Other displays are possible (VoiceXML, WML).
Portal Services
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We had several services that we
portletizing as part of this project:
• Job submission
• File Transfer
• Job Monitoring
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We develope DOD versions of TACC’s GPIR
services
We extended Jetspeed login to support
web kiniting (with SecurID).
Job Submission
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Primarily based at ARL
• Support Fluent, ANSYS, ABAQUS
• Services construct GRD scripts, allow users to
run and archive jobs.
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We are extending this to support ANSYS at
ASC, DMEFS codes at ARL.
We need to extend script generators for
other queuing systems.
• PBS, LoadLeveler, LSF
File Management
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File management services allow you to
• Upload, download files between desktop and
remote HPC
• Download entire directories as zipped files.
• Delete remote files.
• Navigate remote directories.
• Unzip/untar remotely.
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Targetting ASC and ARL initially
• ARL is available in production
Job Monitoring
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We have web interfaces that will allow to
monitor your jobs on various hosts.
• Constructs an HTML table of your running jobs
in a unified format.
• Allows you to stop jobs
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We support GRD in production portal at
ARL.
Have ported this to PBS, LSF, and
LoadLeveler as part of this project.
Access to Portlets
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Obviously not all users have accounts at
all centers.
• An ASC file browser should be accessible only
to users with an ASC account.
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Jetspeed has role based accessed control
to portlets.
Each user can be assigned to one or more
user roles (“ERDC”, “ASC”, etc).
This controls which portlets a user can add
to his or her display.
GridPort Information Repository
(GPIR)
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Developed by TACC group for NPACI
resources.
Porting this to DOD.
Aim is to aggregate and cache grid
and portal related data from multiple
sources in a uniform way.
• MDS, NWS, custom data providers
GPIR Approach
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GPIR is implemented as a set of Java Web
Services, one to handle the input of GPIR data
(Ingester WS) and another to facilitate the
querying of that data (Query WS)
The Ingester WS accepts or "ingests" several
types of XML documents and stores them in a
relational database (currently MySQL, Postgres).
• These documents are created by a variety of means,
including Java Clients that exist on the resources
themselves, http "web scraping" of machine-specific flatfile formats, and queries of additional information
providers such and MDS, GMS (Grid Monitor Service),
and NWS (Network Weather Service).
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Persistently stored data can then be queried via
the Query Web Service which uses the same XML
resources used by the Ingester, in addition to
some Query specific documents that can return
XML such as Machine Summary data.
GPIR Schema Types
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Static: static data for a machine.
Load: load data for a machine.
Status: machine status (up, down, unavailable).
Downtime: downtime data for a machine.
Jobs: job data for a machine.
MOTD: Message of the Day data for a machine.
Nodes: Nodes data for a machine.
Services: represents the status of grid software
running on a system.
NWS: This returns bandwidth and latency
measurements of the type returned by NWS.
Current Developments in
the Portal World
Where Are We Today?
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JSR 168 is an important new standard for
Java portals.
• Standardizes portlet containers
• Commercial products available from Sun, IBM,
Oracle, BEA
• Open source implementations include uPortal,
GridSphere, eXo, Jetspeed2
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Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
also available.
• Compatible standard to JSR 168 that uses
SOAP and WSDL to communicate between
portlet container and portlet.
• Potentially allows containers and portlets to be
from different languages (Java, C#, Python,
PHP).
Some Portlet Projects
Open Grid Computing
Environments Consortium
Portlet component providers
Sakai
Education-focused portal
tools. UMich’s CHEF, uPortal,
IU’s OneStart, etc.
GridSphere
EU project that develops both
portlet containers and Grid
portlets.
User Portlets from OGCE
Portal Capabilities
Description
Grid Proxy Certificate Manager
Get MyProxy certs after logging in.
Schedule
Interactive individual and group calendars
Discussion
Persistent topic-based discussion for groups
Chat
Live chat services and interfaces
Document managers
WEBDav based document system for group file sharing
MDS/LDAP Browsers
Basic Globus MDS browsing and navigating
GridContext Portlets
Access context services for managing metadata
GRAM Job Submission
Run simple executables on remote hosts
GridFTP
Upload, download, crossload remote files.
GPIR Portlets
View, interact with HPC status, job, etc information.
Anabas
Access to Anabas shared display applets
Newsgroups and citation portlets
Post topics to newsgroup, manage group references and
citations with access controls
More User Portlets and Services
Portal Capabilities
Description
CoG Workflow demonstration portlet
Set up and run task graphs using the Java CoG
Job Scheduling and Sequencing
Schedule sequences of jobs on several hosts using
Community Scheduling Framework.
Condor Portlets
Interact with Condor through browser.
Application Management
Combine GridFTP and GRAM into application wizard
forms.
Newsgroup Services
Download and install server side of the OGCE
newsgroup system.
OGRE Job Management Services
Manage complicated grid tasks through an extensible,
Apache Ant like task list.
XDirectory Services
The backend for the Grid Context portlet
Why Is This Important?
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HPCMP developers generate extremely
sophisticated web interfaces and services to
science and engineering applications.
• These should be portlets
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Things like login, user display layouts managers,
access controls to content, etc., should not be
reinvented.
• There are plenty of portal projects that have done this.
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These are portlet containers.
• You should not reinvent this.
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By adopting the portlet/container approach, you
can also create portals that combine HPCMP
specific content as well as third party portlets.
• Calendars, RSS news feeds, document managers, WIKI
like features, etc.
What is JSR 168?
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Defines the (Java) standard for vendor
container-independent portlet components.
• Portlets can be developed independently of the
container.
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Many implementations:
• Gridsphere, uPortal, WebSphere, Jetspeed2, ….
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From the portlet development point of view, it
is really very simple:
• You write a java class that extends GenericPortlet.
• You override/implement several methods inherited
from GenericPortlet.
• You use some supporting classes/interfaces
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Many are analogous to their servlet equivalents
Some (portletsession) actually seem to be trivial
wrappers around servlet equivalents in Pluto.
The Infamous Big Picture
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As a portlet developer, the previous set of classes are all
you normally touch.
The portlet container (such as Pluto or Gridsphere) is
responsible for running your portlets.
• Init, invoke methods, destroy.
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Portlets have a very limited way of interacting with the
container.
• It is a black box.
• The API is basically one-way.
Some Suggestions
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Java-based systems should adopt JSR 168 based
portlet containers for Java based systems.
All components should be at least Web Service
“ready”
• Use WSDL to define APIs for services (and bind later to
specific programming implementations)
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Make a clean separation between portals and
services.
• “Service oriented approach” will allow both desktop GUIs
and portals to use the same services.
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Monitor WSRP as a way to build multilingual
portals.
More Suggestions
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Portal/service teams have to be firstclass members of the MSRC
infrastructure.
• Need to know about HPC turnover well
in advance.
• Command line login changes need to be
accompanied by simultaneously
approved Web logins.
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Need more uniformity in MSRCs
• TeraGrid’s CTSS “common software
stack” as a possible model.
Telescoping Portal Architecture
Job
Submit
File
Manage
Security