Providing Portlet-Based Client Access to CIMA-Enabled Crystallographic Instruments, Sensors, and Data

The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) project, supported by the NSF Middleware Initiative, aims at making scientific instruments and sensors remotely accessible by providing a general solution for services and user interfaces to remotely access data from instruments and to remotely monitor experiments. X-ray crystallography is one of several motivating applications for the development of CIMA. Data such as CCD frames and sensor readings may be accessed by portals through middleware services as they are being acquired or through persistent archives. CIMA software may be used to federate online instruments in multiple labs, so this project must also address problems in data management and data sharing. This paper describes a collaboration between the CIMA and the Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) project to enable remote users to monitor instruments and interact with data gathered from CIMA-enabled crystallography laboratories through various Web portal components (portlets) running within a standards-compliant portal container. We also discuss an approach taken to develop portlets that use Web services for data management and solutions for managing distributed identity and access control