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The Vine Toolkit

Vine is a modular, extensible Java application and library development framework created by the authors of GridSphere's GridPortlets Project ( http://www.gridsphere.org ). Vine inherits and improves upon the Resources Model of GridPortlets and generalizes it for use in many application environments. Vine can be easily packaged and deployed for use in desktop, Java Web Start, Java Servlet 2.3 and Java Portlet 1.0 applications. Using the Vine Toolkit, one composes applications as collections of resources and services for utilizing those resources. The Vine Toolkit makes it possible to organize resources into a heirarchy of domains to represent one or more virtual organizations (VOs). Vine offers security mechanisms for authenticating end-users and authorizing their use of resources within a given domain. Other core features include an extensible model for executing tasks and transparent support for persisting information about resources and tasks with in-memory or external relational databases.

Maintained By

Vine is developed at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center ( http://www.man.poznan.pl ) in Poznan, Poland and receives funding from the OMII-Europe Project ( http://www.omii-europe.org ), BEINGRID ( http://www.beingrid.eu ) and other European Union funded projects.

License

Vine is released under the Apache 2.0 License ( http://www.apache.org/licenses/ ) and allows software to be used by anyone for any purpose, without restriction.

Status

Vine is publicly available at http://www.gforge.man.poznan.pl .

Vine Projects

The Vine Toolkit consists of several projects, each addressing particular areas of functionality. Vine's flagship projects include the Groupware Vine, which addresses user management and related security mechanisms, and the Grid Vine, which provides a high-level API and model of Grid-related concepts. Each project offers multiple entry-points for adaptation and extension to support a wide-variety of third-party Grid middleware and services.

Middleware Support

The Vine Toolkit is an ideal framework for developing Java-based Grid-enabled applications. The Vine Project actively develops support for the following Grid middleware:

•         gLite 3.0 and higher ( http://www.cern.ch/glite/ )
•         Globus Toolkit 4.0 and higher ( http://www.globus.org )
•         OGSA-DAI 2.2 and higher ( http://www.ogsadai.org.uk )
•         Storage Resource Broker ( http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php )
•         UNICORE 6 ( http://www.unicore.eu )
•         Virtual Organization Management Services (Distributed with gLite)

Standards

The Vine Toolkit includes support for Web and Grid standards adopted by the Open Grid Forum ( http://www.gridforum.org ) and other internationally recognized organizations. Supported standards include, for example:

•         Basic Execution System (BES)
•         Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
•         Generic Security Services (GSS) API
•         Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF)

Web Portals

The Vine Toolkit is an ideal framework for developing Web applications and includes a collection of Web-based user interfaces that support the Java Portlet 1.0 API ( http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 ). Vine is ideally suited for deployment with the GridSphere 3.1 Portal Framework and has support for the Liferay 4.3.2 and higher ( http://www.liferay.com ). Vine's portlets include:

• Account Manager Portlet: A Web user-interface for managing accounts created for Vine applications. Built upon the Groupware Vine API, the Account Manager Portlet supports a wide variety of security mechanisms and can be easily plugged into portal hosting environments, such as GridSphere and Liferay.
• Credential Manager Portlet: A Web user-interface for managing GSS-API credentials. Built upon the Grid Vine Security API, the Credential Manager Portlet supports a management of GSS credentials located on a portal hosting environment and in remote credential repositories, such as MyProxy ( http://grid.ncsa.uiuc.edu/myproxy/ ).
• File Manager Portlet: A Web user-interface for managing files on a Web portal and on remote hosts. Built upon the Grid Vine I/O API, the File Manager Portlet supports a wide variety of I/O and file services.
• Job Manager Portlet: A Web user-interface for submitting and monitoring compute jobs on remote hosts. Built upon the Grid Vine Job API, the Job Manager Portlet supports a wide variety of job submission services.
• Resource Manager Portlet: A Web user-interface for managing Vine resource and domain descriptions.

Moreover, the Vine Toolkit offers a robust single sign-on framework with automated support for many security mechanisms available in popular Grid middleware.