Grid Development Tools for Eclipse

Grid Computing [1, 2] has gained a huge momentum not only in the scienti c community but also in industrial application areas. The technology itself has evolved from proprietary, specialized applications and middleware to the adoption of web service standards [3, 4]. Service-oriented Grid environments o er the possibility to request and use computing power, data access, network bandwith and special devices on demand, ultimately leading to dynamically establishing even the Grid infrastructure itself on demand in service-oriented ad hoc Grid computing [5]. A crucial problem is lowering the barrier to develop Grid applications running in such environments. Helping non-Grid experts to translate their domain knowledge into Grid enabled applications is a key factor in enabling more parties to collaborate in problem solving and resource sharing and form a vibrant global Grid ecosystem. To provide such support, both the runtime complexity of Grid systems and the development complexity of distributed Grid applications must be reduced. Our Grid Development Toolkit for Eclipse (GDT) [6] project focuses on mastering the complexity of the application development process for service-oriented Grid environments. Most modern service-oriented Grid middleware systems are developed using the Java language, making the Eclipse platform an ideal application development environment. The GDT project aims at extending the Eclipse platform with development tools allowing the easy creation and debugging of Grid services and clients. In addition to supporting developers in pure Grid service based application development, additional management functionality for Grid environments is provided by the GDT.