A New Approach to Development and Execution of Interactive Applications on the Grid

This paper presents an approach to development of interactive Grid applications used in the application development platform (Appea), currently under development. The presented environment enables smooth and reliable development of such applications, integrating various types of Web and Grid services as well as data sources spread over a distributed infrastructure. However, the users to which Appea caters require that such applications be capable of interactivity and require human actors to interact with them. The addition of interactivity requirements has not thus far been sufficiently addressed in the Grid domain and indeed many popular Grid middleware platforms do not take sufficient notice of this problem. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe how such aspects of user interactivity are supported by the Appea platform and how they correspond to the needs of end users of Grid applications. The paper presents the motivation behind the proposed solution, a conceptual design of Appea as well as its basic architecture. In addition, a use case is presented, showing how the solution can be applied to a real-life workflow.