Visual programming environments for multi-disciplinary distributed applications

A Problem Solving Environment is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling and running applications in a specific problem area or domain. A Visual Programming Environment is one possible front end to a problem solving environment. It applies the visual programming paradigms of "point and click" and "drag and drop", via a Graphical User Interface, to the various constituent components that are used to assemble an application. The aim of the problem solving environment presented here is to provide the ability to build up scientific applications by connecting, or plugging, software components together and to provide an intuitive way to construct scientific applications. Problem solving environments promise a totally new user environment for computational scientists and engineers. In this new paradigm, individual programs combined to solve a problem in their given area of expertise, are wrapped as components within an integrated system that is both powerful and easy to use. This thesis aims to address: problems in code reuse the combination of different codes in new ways and problems with underlying system familiarity and distribution. This is achieved by abstracting application composition using visual programming techniques. The work here focuses on a prototype environment using a number of demonstration problems from multi-disciplinary problem domains to illustrate some of the main difficulties in building problem solving environments and some possible solutions. A novel approach to code wrapping, component definition and application specification is shown, together with timing and usage comparisons that illustrate that this approach can be used successfully to help scientists and engineers in their daily work.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Visual programming environments for multi-disciplinary distributed applications

A Problem Solving Environment is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling and running applications in a specific problem area or domain. A Visual Programming Environment is one possible front end to a problem solving environment. It applies the visual programming paradigms of "point and click" and "drag and drop", via a Graphical User Interface, to the various constituent components that are used to assemble an application. The aim of the problem solving environment presented here is to provide the ability to build up scientific applications by connecting, or plugging, software components together and to provide an intuitive way to construct scientific applications. Problem solving environments promise a totally new user environment for computational scientists and engineers. In this new paradigm, individual programs combined to solve a problem in their given area of expertise, are wrapped as components within an integrated system that is both powerful and easy to use. This thesis aims to address: problems in code reuse the combination of different codes in new ways and problems with underlying system familiarity and distribution. This is achieved by abstracting application composition using visual programming techniques. The work here focuses on a prototype environment using a number of demonstration problems from multi-disciplinary problem domains to illustrate some of the main difficulties in building problem solving environments and some possible solutions. A novel approach to code wrapping, component definition and application specification is shown, together with timing and usage comparisons that illustrate that this approach can be used successfully to help scientists and engineers in their daily work

Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework