tool -- even quicker than the business environment -- and as a basic language they could use for prototyping and experimentation.
And so all of these things were happening at the same time. Gregor [von Laszewski] was right in the mix of this with the CoG [Commodity Grid Toolkit]. The CoG originally started as tools to allow some of these portal-based interfaces to Grids, and some Java GUIs to interface to Grid environments, but really it's a client-side thing. And then we continued to do various experimentation with pushing more and more services capability into Java components as well. And so, a year ago, once we started really working closely with IBM on the OGSA [the architecture that will be built upon the Open Grid Services Infrastructure, or OGSI] path, we then brought Web services into this mix. And of course Java is one of the leading platforms for programming Web services.
So all of these things were kind of swirling and coming together to get us to where we are today -- where Java is just a good platform for building Web service-enabled server-side components. And that's what OGSA is about: to define standards that talk about how I as a client interact with these Grid services.
dW: So for you, it was the desire to use Web services standards that got you to J2EE?
Tuecke: It was the combination of that and the overall broad adoption of Java. To be clear, we're not a Java-only shop by any means. We still believe very strongly in the protocols, standards, and multiple tool kits for programming. So we have an active effort going on in C-based hosting environments for Web services; we're working closely with a group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory doing Python-based environments. We think all of those things matter a lot. But a year ago when we were launching down the path of doing this Grid services thing, there were really only two decent toolkits out there for doing Web services: there was Apache Axis and Java, and then there was .Net. On the open source side, Apache Axis was about it, so we decided to follow that route.
dW:So are people in the scientific community interested in J2EE, or is this just something that you're developing to make Grid computing applicable to a broader community?
Tuecke:There's certainly a lot of work in the scientific community using Java. I think a lot of people in the scientific community are still trying to get their heads around J2EE. This also partly depends on which part of J2EE you're talking about. Some people, when they think J2EE, they think servlet engines. Others, they think entity and session beans. Certainly the scientific community is very heavily invested in, for example, servlet-based toolkits for interfacing to their scientific applications. I think we've seen less adoption of the heavier-weight container-based models, such as you see in entity beans and session beans. Entity beans really are designed for business relational database sort of applications. You don't see that nature of application quite as much in the scientific community.
Another factor in the scientific space -- more so than in the commercial space -- is open source. There are a lot of groups who believe strongly in open source software as the basis of doing their scientific work. Party because it's free, and partly because that community has a history of needing really special stuff, so the ability to go in and make the tweaks necessary to really make it work for their application. All of these things are good for them.
dW: How far away are these Grid standards from being adopted in the commercial space? When you look at real applications of Grid computing right now, they all seem to be scientific.
Tuecke: There are a few commercial applications starting to pop up out there, but most of them are still in the genre of the cycle scavenging type problem. I think there are two questions in there: one is the question of adoption, the other is the question of standards.
On the standards side, Globus Toolkit has really, over the last year or two, become the de facto standard software for doing a lot of the Grid-based applications, especially in science. But they're not protocol standards, which is where we want to be. OGSI is the first level of
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