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

(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. I

A UI-driven approach to facilitating effective development of rich and composite web applications

It is well-recognized that the development of user interfaces is one of the most time-consuming tasks in the overall application development process. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for rich and fluid user interfaces from web users. As a result, developers are facing increasing challenges in delivering web applications, especially those with rich UI requirements. In this thesis we present two solutions to facilitate the execution and rapid development of web applications with rich user interfaces. The first solution is a rich internet application (RIA) framework aimed at providing high usability and productivity to web applications, while the second solution is a UI integration framework that simplifies web application development by facilitating the composition of reusable UI components. The foundation of our RIA framework is an XML-based high-level protocol for communicating asynchronous events and incremental UI updates on the web. The protocol facilitates rich and highly interactive UI, while at the same time eliminates frequent and slow page refreshes and provides a more responsive user experience. Built on top of the protocol, a server-side runtime allows UI logic code to be executed on the server side, while a set of server-side event-driven API enables developers to implement sophisticated application-specific UI behavior. On the client side, a thin client renders UI and processes native events, but leaves application-specific logic to the server side. The thin client thus allows end users to enjoy a rich UI experience in a safe client environment, without executing any downloaded code. The proposed UI integration framework includes an abstract UI component model which allows UI components to be programmatically manipulated via events, operations, and properties, essentially exposing UI as services. To facilitate component interactions, the framework offers an event-based composition model, which allows integration logic to be specified in the form of event listeners. Composite applications are executed via a lightweight runtime middleware, which provides component adapters that allow the middleware to communicate with native UI components implemented in a variety of languages and platforms. Finally, a graphical development environment allows composite applications to be built in a drag-and-drop fashion