[GSoC 2010] Alternative Presentation Layer for OGSA-DAI

Having the vision of sharing data resources to enable collaboration, Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) provides access, transformation, integration, and delivery of data. It supports Apache Axis 1.4 and Globus Toolkit (gt-4.2), available to download for both the two platforms.
 
Under Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK), an alternative presentation layer using Apache CXF instead of the outdated Axis which is currently used, is discussed as a project for Google Summer of Codes 2010, which I found very interesting for this summer.  

Project Proposal

Project Mentor: Ally Hume

OGSA-DAI has a layered architecture consists of the data layer, business logic layer, presentation layer, and client layer, when considering the architecture in bottom-up. Presentation layer encapsulates the required functionalities to expose the data service resources using the web service interfaces. Presentation layer currently consists of two realization, where each of them have  a WSDL that describes the interface. 

Both the realizations are compliant with Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), and communicate with the respective client stubs using SOAP over HTTP. Hence design and implementation of an alternative RESTful presentation layer using CXF JAX-RS (The Java API for RESTful Web Services) is also included in this project, as it will be lightweight and best for bespoke clients.

This seems an interesting initiative as the performance and the simplicity will be highly improved. I have seen reasonable comparison of Axis 2 and CXF [1], [2], though they must be outdated by this time.

[1] Technical Notes on OGSA-DAI
[2] Resource on writing a presentation layer
[3] OGSA-DAI Tutorial
[4] FAQ: OGSA-DAI WSI-specific (Based on Axis 1.4 web service stack)
[5] FAQ: OGSA-DAI WSRF-specific (Based on the globus toolkit)
[6] General FAQ
[7] Known Problems
[8] Binary Transfer Benchmarks 
[9] GSoC 2010 Announcement in OGSA-DAI blog
[10] Google Summer of Code 2010 site

Set your Vacation responder OFF

Gladly opened the reply I got for the mailing list to check whether I got what I needed. "Out of office from 19  of March until 5 of April 2010. Back on April, 6th.", someone's vacation responder has mailed me. Too sad to see these vacation responders not being smart enough to differentiate the personal mails from the mails received from the mailing lists. Without knowing what he does, that man is spamming each and everyone one who is sending a mail to the mailing list.

Another annoyance is 'unsubscribe' mail flood. If you want to unsubscribe from a mailing list, mostly you should send a mail to -user-request@ or -dev-request with the word unsubscribe in the message body, or a blank message to -user-unsubscribe@ or -dev-unsubscribe@ depending on the particular list's settings. NOT a mail with the body and/or header 'unsubscribe' to the user/dev list itself. This piece of information is mostly provided as a footer with each mail, still people continue making the same mistake.

Zotero 2.0.2 and word processors

Zotero is a free Firefox extension to collect, manage, cite, and share the research sources, which is also available in the clouds, making our list of references available anywhere. Zotero provides word processor plugins for Ms.Word and OOo Writer (and NeoOffice - A free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform). At the moment, it seems OOo is unable to provide the support for the plugin due to the unavailability of the original developer [1]. 

Zotero does not have the Abiword support yet. There are requests for the feature on both Abiword's bugzilla and Zotero's Feature Request. I'd like to see someone from Zotero developers' team considering this request to make this possible. As Zotero and Firefox are portable and are capable of working from a thumb drive, it would be better to have a plugin for Abiword as this would make Zotero package a really portable on with all the three being portable, considering the availability of the Abiword portable application.

GSoC2010!

Last night Google announced the list of the accepted organization, with 151 organizations, where 15% of the list is new to the program. Abiword is in for Google Summer of Codes once more. I just noticed some new, but interesting organizations like Facebook too are there in the list.

Windows Security alert on Ubuntu OS!

I was checking out some cites while preparing for the upcoming ICT seminar of 06CSE that to be held in Jaffna. Suddenly a pop up took me to the site freescanreveals.org. The site was showing a nice screenshot of 'my computer' showing the list of affected files, repeatedly prompting me to install the anti-virus to cure the virus attack. Funny! It has faked a Windows XP OS nicely on my Ubuntu 9.10. [ROFL]

Anyway the fake messagebox was so real that can scare any of the windows operating system user by using "System Security Antivirus" messages. It was a loop, so I had to forcefully shutdown the browser. Finally I confirmed from Spamhaus that freescanreveals.org is a reported attack-site posing as providing an anti-virus software.

Please make sure your virus identifies my operating system and acts accordingly.

Fortnight Reports and Presentations

Fortnight Reports depicting my progress on our Mooshabaya Project can be found below.
Fortnight Reports: FNR17, FNR16, FNR15, FNR14, FNR13, FNR12, FNR11, FNR10, FNR9, FNR8, FNR7,FNR6, FNR5, FNR4, FNR3, FNR2, FNR1

First Formal Presentation: 30/10/2009. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [83/100]
Second Formal Presentation / Viva: [Evaluation of the report and progress]: 10/12/2009. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [90/100]
Draft Report [75/100]
Third Formal Presentation: 24/03/2010. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [78/100]

Overall view of Mooshabaya

References - Mozilla Rhino Host Object
[1] Writing a Custom Host Object
[2] Tutorial: Embedding Rhino
[3] File Host Object

* Special thanks to JetBrains for providing the Open Source License for the Mooshabaya Project; Open Source License concept makes IDEA more FOSS-friendly.

Motivation and Llovizna

ClustrMaps is here being awarded as the biggest motivator for me to blog. Not kidding. It does give a huge encouragement. Isn't it good to see many people from different countries taking a look at our blog posts? But I should accept the sad truth that since they archive the map once a year, all those sweet red dots indicating the visitors will be gone in a few days, making the journey start from zero once more. For my future reference, I have just archived the 'dots' here.
Bookmarks of ClustrMaps or its facebook page is also worth visiting.