MAGE-GDT: Grid Development Tools (not only) for Eclipse

Overview

The Grid Development Tools (GDT) feature is a bundle of Eclipse Plugins useful for Service and Application Development, Workflow Creation, Grid Management and others in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment and Part of the Marburg Ad-hoc Grid Environment (MAGE). Apart from using GDT in the Eclipse Workbench interactively we support using parts of the plugins as Eclipse headless, i.e. running the GDT Service Generator tools as commandline tools, offering the possibility to include them in automated build scripts. The GDT Service Generator supersedes development of the eclipse plugin and the old command line service generator.
GDT is devided into GDT Service Generator, the Visual Grid Orchestrator and the partly standalone Tools for Grid Management, Development and other Grid related tools. Available at the moment:

• GDT Service Generator Version 1.3.3
• GDT Visual Grid Orchestrator (ViGO) Version 1.0
• Slim GDT-Headless Service Generator Version 1.3.3
• GDT Certificate Request Creation and Signing Tools (GDT CR-CT/ST) Version 1.0.4
• GDT Remote Service Debugging Version 1.0.0

Comming soon:

• GDT Management Tool

Tutorials are available online and if you install the GDT Service Generator feature, there's also Help available in your Eclipse workbench, describing more details about the use of the GDT Service Generator.

• Installation Instructions
• Downloads, Beta Versions & Nightly Build Installation Instructions

• Tutorials

• Contact & Mailing lists

• More about GDT Service Generator Design
• GDT Developers

• Changelogs

• Frequently Asked Questions

• License

If you have further questions about the GDT please contact: GDT Developers (gdt-gt4 (at) mage.uni-marburg.de)

Gotchas

These are some of the things users have experienced problems with:

Service Generator:

• Your Java Project MUST use separate source and output folders (contrary to Eclipse default settings).
• Java 5 Code compliance MUST be enabled for the project (no annotation support prior to Java 5 aka 1.5).
• The service name and annotated class SHOULD NOT end in "Service", the wizard will give a warning if you try this.
• NEVER place bean-classes in the annotated class package.

Certificate Request Creation and Signing Tools:

• For the Certificate Request Creation and Signing Tools you need to run Eclipse with Java 6 aka 1.6.

Limitations

These limitations are temporary, we will fix these issues in future releases! Service Generator:

• No stable refactoring: do NOT rename or move the annotated class! Take care when renaming methods and attributes (probably delete the generated artifacts and stubs and re-save the annotated service).
• The primitive datatype char may not be used as GridMethod? parameters/return type as well as GridAttribute? type, since it is not supported by Axis.
• Overloading of GridMethods? must not be used, since this is not supported by Axis/WSDL Definition.

Call for Contribution

We have tested everything under Windows XP, Mac OS X, as well as Linux. If you experience any bugs, please feel free to submit a bug at our Bug Trac. We would also be very interested in suggestions for new features we should incorporate in future releases of the plugin.

Acknowledgements

This project is partially sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the D-Grid Initiative.

IBM supported the GDT Service Generator with an Eclipse Innovation Award 2005.

Siemens AG - Corporate Technology provided partial funding for some of the developers.

Copyright 2005 - 2008 - The Distributed Systems Group - University of Marburg, Germany