Collaborative Environments Group

XCactus is a graphic user interface for Cactus users. It will provide some basic functionalities, such as thorn management, parameter browse and edit, job submission and monitoring. XCactus also helps to serve as a prototype for the web interface of the Cactus Portal.

In addition to the client side GUI, a parser based on Lex & Yacc has also been developed to generate an XML descriptor for Cactus. This will help to integrate the development of Cactus in different projects, such as XCactus and the Cactus Portal. The descriptor will provide a common interface for all Cactus related packages, such as XCactus, Cactus Portal, etc.

You can find out more information about XCactus under: http://wugrav.wustl.edu/people/JTAO

The GridSphere portal framework provides an open-source portlet based Web portal. GridSphere enables developers to quickly develop and package third-party portlet web applications that can be run and administered within the GridSphere portlet container. Here you will find the GridSphere portal framework available for download and documentation related to the installation and development of portlets using GridSphere.

The Cactus Portal will be built as a Java web application that runs inside the GridSphere Portal framework developed by the GridLab project. The advantages of using GridSphere come not only from the base set of functionality that it provides, such as user management and content display, but also from the value-added services that have been built into the GridSphere framework or packaged with it, such as a standard tag library and an array of Portlet Services ranging from credential management to interfacing with information servers and resource brokers.

You can find out more information about Gridsphere under: http://www.gridsphere.org