The Grid Browser: Improving Usability in Service-Oriented Grids by Automatically Generating Clients and Handling Data Transfers

This paper presents a grid browser as a familiar environment for accessing a service-oriented grid. To relieve the service developer from developing a graphical user interface and a grid service client, and to relieve the service provider from installing and maintaining a grid portal, the proposed grid browser can be used instead of a grid portal. A grid browser is a Web browser that renders WSDL files similar to HTML files. Surfing to the location of the WSDL description of a grid service results in the automatic generation of a graphical frontend in the grid browser which a user can easily fill out to invoke a service or submit a job. Furthermore, data transfers are integrated into the grid browser by integrating an implementation of the Flex-SwA architecture, such that data transmission and service invocation can be done efficiently in a single step. An implementation of the proposed grid browser to improve the usability of a service-oriented grid is presented. A use case points out the advantages of the grid browser.