SimpleGrid 2.0: A learning and development toolkit for building highly usable TeraGrid science gateways

The science gateway approach has been widely employed to bridge cyberinfrastructure and domain science communities for advancing scientific and engineering problem solving. Numerous efforts have been made toward developing Web-based gateway systems to enable efficient and integrated access to cyberinfrastructure resources and services. As the number of science gateways grows rapidly, however, it still remains challenging for a science gateway to be widely adopted and used by its targeted science community users mainly because of the difficulties in efficiently providing transparent access to cyberinfrastructure, creating user-friendly gateway user environments, and developing and integrating domain-specific gateway applications. This paper develops a usability-oriented Web approach to address these difficulties, and extends the SimpleGrid Toolkit to enable the learning and development of highly usable gateway software components. The paper illustrates the use of cutting edge Web 2.0 technologies in building highly interactive and collaborative gateway user environments. Based on service-oriented architecture, a gateway Web service framework is designed and implemented to efficiently convert domain scientific programs into REST Web services. This framework allows flexible service deployment and integration by representing a service as a Web resource that can be accessed using standard Web protocols. SimpleGrid is packaged and documented for efficient learning, as illustrated by the experiences of using the SimpleGrid Toolkit in TeraGrid science gateway tutorials and targeted gateway support.