The myGrid framework is a component model for flexible, simple and future-proof deployment and use of services on the Grid.

The framework aims to solve the following general problems.

• Development of service clients that are not limited by the range of standards known at deployment time.
• Control over how service operations are invoked, so that they can make use of the most suitable methods supported by a service.
• Ease of development of sophisticated services by separation of concerns and re-use of third party functionality.
• Provision of a standard client interface hiding the differences in deployment philosophy that each middleware technology brings.
• Consistent distribution of functionality over a set of services.
• Application of solutions to the above to services deployed using technologies such as OGSA Grid Services, Web Services and Enterprise JavaBeans^?.

Our specific contributions are as follows.

1. A client-side API that allows clients to invoke services in a protocol-independent manner.
2. A server-side API that allows a business logic to be deployed according to different standards; our implementation is based on Enterprise JavaBeans^? and we deploy services as Web Services, OGSA Grid Services and EJBs.
3. A nested container model allowing deployers to identify non-business-logic functionality that needs to be deployed in order to facilitate the integration of the service in virtual organisations.
4. An evaluation of the cost of container delegation and of the performance seen from the client side.

Documents

• Simon Miles, Luc Moreau, Vijay Dialani, Xiaojian Liu, and Hugo Mills. myGrid Framework Technical Specification. Technical report, Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia group; Electronics and Computer Science Department; University of Southampton, 2002.

Draft specification for an EJB based component model that would allow us to deploy a service business logic as a mygrid service, where containers would provide default security, support for fault tolerance etc. Services could be exported as OGSA grid services, Web Services or EJBs. A client interface would allow uniform interactions with any of these.

• Simon Miles, Luc Moreau, and Xiaojian Liu. Design and Evaluation of a Component Model for Grid Services. Technical report, Department of Electronics and Computer Science. University of Southampton, 2002. Submitted for publication.

Various standards have been proposed for deployment and discovery of services on the Internet. These include technologies related to Web Services, Enterprise JavaBeans^? (EJBs) and Grid Services as part of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). Each is motivated by different concerns, provides different functionality and is evolving to meet future demands. From a client's point of view, these differences can prevent them from making use of the full range of services available as doing so will require considerable effort on their part to follow all the changing standards. From a service provider's point of view, making a service available in a variety of ways to clients would be desirable, but potentially difficult. Furthermore, in trying to distribute functionality between services, such as providing distributed security models, service providers are as hampered by the differences in deployment technology as clients.

We propose a nested component model, allowing service developers and providers to achieve several aims in relation to deployment of their Grid services. First, they can separate concerns in their business logic from the on-the-wire protocol specifications. Second, they can deploy their services in a systematic manner. Third, our model allows service providers to configure service behaviour, such as fault tolerance and security, through the use of nested components. Our model also aids clients, by allowing them to interact with services in a protocol-independent manner. In this paper, we describe the design of the component model and evaluate the performance of a prototype implementation based on EJBs.

• Simon Miles. Automated Deployment in the myGrid Framework. Technical report, Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia group; Electronics and Computer Science Department; University of Southampton, 2002.