Code-A-Thon

I attended the NHIN CONNECT Code-A-Thon in Portland, Oregon last week. It was two days of developers planning out and working on the next release of the NHIN CONNECT software (v2.3). There's a wiki up with notes from the two days worth of sessions.

But the interesting, relevant piece was when they started talking about future architecture. Two of the future topics (out of probably 20 or so) were grid computing and cloud computing. Because of the distributed nature of NHIN (CONNECT nodes everywhere), we had a short discussion about how data and computing power can be spread around in a distributed manner. Specifically, the question of hadoop and map-reduce was brought up about how jobs can be spread out over NHIN and NHIN-compatible systems.

On the whole, a pretty remarkable mini-con. This is a new approach to Federal open source projects and refreshing that OSS has come so far.

Defense Department sets up its own SourceForge

DoD has set up their own open source portal. This seems similar to what the biosurveillance folks have been thinking of configuring.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10154053-16.html

From the article linked above...
"Despite being based on SourceForge's technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense's code repository has been 'upgraded to meet DOD security requirements,' with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials."

(comically forgemil is down right now so I can't verify with my own eyes)

Globus service testing using SoapUI

One of the tools I like to use to test out web services is SoapUI (because it is free, open source, 100% Java and other superlatives). So far this is useful for calling public (anonymous access) services, but for secure services it didn't work out.

From the gt-users mailing list, Joel Scheider emailed me to let me know:

Using soapUI, it is possible to pass a client-side SSL credential to a web Service, e.g., for GSI Transport (TLS) authentication, but it's necessary to first convert the public/private key into Java keystore format, as described in Appendix A of this document:

http://agnis.googlegroups.com/web/UsingSoapUIWithAgnis.pdf

Instead of creating a proxy certificate, this method uses the client certificate directly, so delegation is not supported, but TLS authentication still works.

soapUI also claims to support WS-Security, but I haven't personally tried using that feature yet.

Thought this may be helpful for anyone else who needs a quick way to call Globus services.