Workflow-driven portals for the integration of legacy applications
Andrew Harrison, Ian Kelley, Ian Taylor · ORCA Online Research @Cardiff (Cardiff University) · 2006
There is a whole class of applications that would benefit from advances in Grid technology, but for various reasons cannot be easily modified to run natively in a Gridaware environment. To enable these applications to reap the benefits of the Grid without requiring fundamental modifications, new techniques are being developed for wrapping codes with a light-weight, but Grid-aware, container. By combining workflow techniques for the management and chaining of application logic with the Grid’s service architecture, complex business logic can be introduced which greatly enhances an application’s scope and usefulness in today’s distributed Grid environments. Exposing this functionality through Grid Portal technology further simplifies both the process of managing workflows and the user experience. In this paper, we will introduce how we propose to combine legacy code integration with advanced workflow mechanisms and portal technologies to provide scientific application developers with new and useful mechanisms for leveraging legacy code in new distributed environments.