Programming the Grid: Portal Services Documentation

IeSE: An Integrated e-Science Environment

Rob Allan, Andrew Richards and Rik Tyer

The manual provides documentation for Web service methods developed in the IeSE project. The methods underpin presentation-layer portals (InfoPortal, DataPortal and HPCPortal) and enable the development of a Grid programming paradigm near the application layer. The remote method calls are described here together with their WSDL and registry and discovery mechanism via the CCLRC UDDI server.

Portal services can add value to the basic Grid API. The Web services which are described in this manual provide a higher-level platform which can be programmed against. This is not possible directly with a portal which presents a fixed set of pages encapsulating functionality and each giving a limited number of options to the user. The Web service interface accesses the same underlying functionality, but enables existing applications, scripts and GUI interfaces to make use of the value added to the core Grid services and database interfaces.

After a semantic description of the service calls, examples of using the portal services infrastructure are given in C, Perl and Java. A specific example of adapting an existing GUI is discussed.