A Component Framework for Building Web Science Gateways and Portals

Portlet-based Grid portals have become a crucial part of the international distributed computing infrastructure to support computational science ("Cyberinfrastructure") provide component-based problem solving environments for scientists. Although Web portals are intended to provide user-friendly environments with easy-to-use interfaces, the development of portals and their portlet components is time consuming. This paper aims to address this problem by providing reusable components for rapid portlet development. This approach, Grid Tag Libraries and Beans (GTLAB), encapsulates common Grid operations with reusable XML tags, providing a dramatically simplified programming interface to common cyberinfrastructure services. GTLAB also provides a way for creating composite tasks that models the requirements of computational science portals.