Important Things to Know about GT4

GT4 to emphasize quality, robustness, ease-of-use and documentation

GT users increasingly insist on production-grade code quality, robustness, ease-of-deployment and operation, and documentation. In response, the Globus development team is working to improve code quality and expand testing in all parts of the system, but in particular in the Web services (WS) components first introduced in prototype form in GT3.

The result is that GT4 will represent a major advance in terms of overall quality:

  • The first GT release to feature an extended 6-month alpha-beta testing cycle
  • The first GT release in which quality assurance tools will be used to identify gaps in existing test coverage
  • The first GT release to fully exploit the NMI build/test facility for daily, multi-platform testing
  • The first GT development cycle to include a formal external testing program
  • Enhanced component-level documentation, version migration guide and a suite of new application-oriented user guides

GT4 will be standards-compliant

GT4 represents a major step forward in terms of compatibility with Web services standards. In particular, all GT4 Web services, and any Web service developed with GT4, can be configured to be compatible with the WS-Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile. More specifically:

  • All GT4 Web service interfaces will be WS-I compliant
  • GT4 will support plaintext name-password and X.509 authentication, as well as the widely-used Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)

In addition, we note that the X.509 credential format used by GSI is now an IETF recommendation, and the GridFTP protocol supported by GT4's GridFTP is a GGF recommendation.

GT4 will work with standard tooling

GT4 users will be able to use standard tooling to develop clients for both GT-provided Web services and Web services based on GT components. Any WS-I-compliant tooling that includes WS-Addressing support can be used (i.e., Apache Axis, .NET, WebSphere, etc.)

GT4 will support WS-Resource Framework and WS-Notification specifications

The WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) and WS-Notification (WSN) specifications were submitted to OASIS in May 2004 as a result of experience with the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specification developed in GGF. GT4 will implement the current version (as of June 2004) of the WSRF/WSN specifications.

The GT4 implementation of WSRF/WSN is a set of libraries and handlers that plug into standard Axis to facilitate the development of WSRF services. This architecture makes it easy to write a single Axis service that can interface efficiently with many resources. More information on these specifications can be found at http://www.globus.org/wsrf/.

GT4 Web Services will work with standard Apache Axis

GT4 is the first release in which GT-based Web services will run in an Apache Axis container straight from Axis CVS. The Java Web services' "deployment environment" (Java WS Core) distributed with GT4 is comprised of two components:

  1. A standard Apache Axis distribution, plus WS-Addressing and WS-Security support
  2. A set of libraries and handlers that implement WSRF/WSN and GSI behaviors, for use by service implementations that use those mechanisms

You can help make GT4 better

The Globus team relies heavily on community involvement in GT testing, and the lengthy 6-month release cycle offers multiple opportunities for you to contribute. Please contact [email protected] if you have an interest in contributing in the following or any other way:

  • Comments. Your comments on this document, related component descriptions and release plans will be greatly appreciated.
  • Tiger team test partners. We are signing up a set of tiger team testing partners who are willing to commit to working closely with GT4 during its development; in return, we commit to providing rapid technical support.
  • GT4-enabled software. We hope that the lengthy development cycle will make it possible for developers of GT-based libraries and tools to release GT4-based versions of their software simultaneously with our final release.
  • Contributions. There are of course many useful GT-related components, both software and documentation, that we will not have time to develop ourselves. Please let us know what you think is missing, but even better, please consider signing up to contribute the missing pieces yourself!