Globus Toolkit's Future

Today Ian Foster sent out an email about Globus' future plans, which contains many interesting points.

First, a GRAM5 (for job submission) will come out as a replacement for both GRAM2 (old fashion) and GRAM4 (web service based). It confirms my feeling that web service based job submission such as GridSAM does not pick up enough users. The old fashion job submission just can not be retired at this moment.

Second, the Java web service core will be re-implemented to leverage state-of-the-art technologies. Apache CXF is selected as the web service development kit. See here for a very informative comparison between several popular latest the web service development kits including Apache CXF, Apache Axis2 and Metro (the JAX-WS RI). Apache CXF is favored over Apache Axis2 because Axis2 uses proprietary deployment model and lacks the support for IoC containers such as Spring Framework.

Third, globus.org will provide RFT (reliable file transfer) online service, which provides reliable, high-performance, end-to-end, fire-and-forget data transfer. globus.org has moved into the era of cloud computing!

Fourth, MDS (monitoring and discovery service) will be refactored to separate monitoring and service/resource discovery. Monitoring will be left to mature dedicated monitor softwares. MDS itself will focus on acting as a service registry. I certainly agree this decision since it favors the idea of separating concerns. The recently published GLUE2 spec still mixes up monitoring data and service metadata for discovery. It is interesting to see if the future development of GLUE will reflect the decision made on MDS.