Simplifying the service creation process

This is week 2 of me formally joining the Grid team in the NCPHI Lab. I am now focusing the majority of my efforts on specific Grid task but still contribute some of my time the PHINMS team as an advisor and architect. In the past 2 weeks of my efforts in the lab I have been trying to wrap my head around some of the challenges of the Grid regarding its implementation in the public health community. Additionally, I have closely examined the whole process of building and deploying a Globus service.

For the first week or so, I spent my time trying to get my development environment set up. This effort took more time than I expected due to the shift in paradigm of a pure production environment to a more R&D environment. None-the-less, I have prevailed and the result is that I am now up and running on 2 VMs. My personal preference is the Unbuntu VM. I also have a RedHat VM which Admin, Dan swears by. Since I always consider admins a programmer's best friend, I have to quietly defer. The Unbuntu environment is what I use heavily at home so there is an added layer of comfort here.

To get to the meat of this post, I have successfully built and deployed (in my environment) a Globus service! In week one I went through the GTK4 programmers manual examining the manual process in creating a service. Since I am a purest when it comes to programming, I figure, if I can not get any of the tools to work I can always just do it manually. After reviewing the book I poked around the Globus system. I downloaded the ws-core and deployed it to a Tomcat container. In my home environment this took no time. I then played with some of the packaged services. From there I was told about Introduce. This is the Globus Service Development Toolkit that Peter and Felica were using. In my attempts to get it set up it was a struggle. There are a lot of moving parts but I did have some mild success. After going through the generated service package there was a lot of items in it that I was not sure of its purpose. I chalked it up to not having enough knowledge about globus and caBig. Later I discussed some of my findings with Felica. She is very experienced with the Globus container and Introduce and she shared with me that there are a lot of caBig wrapped Globus jars used in the services that are generated as well as some redundancy regarding the jars used in the caBig default container. After further examination and discussions, I quickly arrived at the conclusion that deploying services using the Introduce tool may add a support burden that make approach critical mass as PHGrid gains wider adoption. Regardless, it did work, so at a minimum this was a milestone for me to have created a service. This was all in week 1.

Week 2
Immediate, I began to search for other solution that was simpler to understand, develop and manage. I then came across GDTE. The website was a little choppy but informative. A little background, I am an old school developer, from the days of C/C++ and Motif so the majority of my career I have used vi as my editing tool and have only recently, past 2-3 years, began to attach to an IDE, again I am a purest. :-) While I believe over time the IDE may erode my mind, it does make sense as the number of libs and methods/functions are too numerous to remember. So it does add some efficiency. All of that to say, I used mostly Netbeans in the past and I only used eclipse intermittently. GDTE uses eclipse so I had to put on my eclipse hat. It took me about 15 minutes to find the correct distro but then took me a few days to get it configured properly in my environment. To my credit there were some inconsistencies in my VM environment. However in the course of a couple of days, Dan Washington, he is part of the League of Superior Admins, came to my rescue and resolved my issues. So early Thursday I had a working eclipse environment. From there, I went to the GDTE site and followed their straight forward approach in developing a service. The end result is that their service generation is much cleaner and uses the pure Globus jars for its deployment. It does add 2 extra jars but these are Minor. Overall, the process was much simpler than Introduce and the output was much cleaner so for my efforts I am rolling with GDTE. Here is their link:

http://mage.uni-marburg.de/trac/gdt/wiki/WikiStart

Here are some hurdles I have over come via trial and error. Do not use the latest version of eclipse 3.4.x GDTE will not work with this version. I downloaded easyeclipse 1.3.1.1. here is their link:

http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html

Download the version :EasyEclipse for Plug-ins and RCP Apps 1.3.1.1
This version will have all of the plug-ins you need. From there you can just follow the instructions from the GDTE folks. This group seems to be very active, I looked though their e-mail archives to get a feel. They are aware of the issues with 3.4 and are going to make fixes in their next distro.

Lastly, only installed the Service Generator and certifcate tool, I had issues with the ViGO (GDT Visual Grid Orchestrator (ViGO) Version 1.0 ) tool as there are some dependencies needed by eclipse. I got my service built, compiled and deployed successfully using this tool last night at 10:23pm. So having been up since 4 am I was a little tired in trying to figure it out. I will later.

Next, I plan to merge the back end code (I wrote in week 1) with my newly created service and then formally deploy the results to the NCPHI training node. Additionally, I will determine the "fitness" of the resulting GAR from GDTE. The fitness determination will let me know how the gar generation process should be augmented to increase the supportability in a PHGrid federation. I will post more about this later.

One last note, if you are familiar with annotation then you will love the GDTE tool. Their technique for Globus services development seems to be similar to WSIT/METRO (Sun's WS development). More to come.