Portlet-based Portal Design for Grid Systems

A grid portal is a user's access point to grid systems. A disadvantage existing in grid portals is that they are usually designed for specific applications and difficult to adapt to new applications. Portlets are Java based Web components, which makes a portal more flexible and can be easily reused. Grid systems have some common services, and these services are independent from each other somewhat. In this paper, we propose a portlet-based grid portal architecture by encapsulating one or more grid services to a portlet. This architecture enables a user to configure a grid portal environment that suits him best and improves the reusability of the grid portal. A portlet-based grid portal prototype is implemented to evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of the architecture