Investigating the Use of Gadgets, Widgets, and OpenSocial to Build Science Gateways

Many science applications require more and more computing power as the amount of input data keeps increasing. To simplify using large-scale clusters and complicated application codes, and to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, there has been substantial research and development work on Web-based science gateways. With numerous gateways needing to be developed for many different scientific domains, there has also been a long-standing need for reusable codes and extensible component models. During the previous decade, the component model for many gateways was the Java portlet. To overcome some of the port let model´s limitations, new gateways take a different approach that utilizes modern Web technologies. In this paper, we examine the use of new standards such as Open Social, Gadgets, and W3C Widgets to build science gateway user interfaces. These standards overcome many shortcomings of the older port let development model. As general-purpose Web standards, however, they lack support for specialized science gateway requirements and so must be extended. We propose a generic architecture in which Open Social is integrated with backend services and grid infrastructures. We implement and evaluate these concepts in the Gadget Container, software developed by the authors.