GRAIL – A Tool for Accessing and Instrumenting WSRF–compliant Web Services

Grid access methods are still dominated by command line tools or manually developed, problem specific graphical user interfaces. This fact reduces the acceptance of the Grid for users, who are not familiar with the usage of the Linux shell or the Grid itself. The first step away from the command line was done by the Globus Alliance by interpreting and realizing the Grid as a Service Oriented Architecture(SOA). The access to this SOA is defined platform and language independent. Nevertheless the access is still realized by command line tools. Only some of these tools are platform independent and the usage is still complicated. So the abilities of a SOA are not applied consequently. GRAIL is a tool to simplify the access to Web services of the GlobusGrid middleware. It provides an easy to use framework for executing Web services and to construct complex relationships between independent services. The underlying framework allows an easy integration of new Web services or generic tasks. GRAIL is intended to be used by developers of Web services for rapid testing as well as by users of the Globus based Grid for simple and flexible access. This paper describes the structure of GRAIL and the benefits from using it.