GRB_WAPI, a RESTful Framework for Grid Portals

Nowadays grid portals are characterized by various and different features and are implemented in very differing programming languages and technologies, still having many structural aspects in common. This paper describes a RESTful Web API, named GRB_WAPI, specifically developed for grid computing that encapsulates all grid control and computation logic need to build a grid portal. Through the adoption of this API a portal developer does not have to deal with grid technical details focusing just on the high level design of her system and on some other aspects that concern presentation, such as portal usability and functionality. The idea of developing a traditional library has been discarded in order to free portal developers from a particular implementation technology. Thanks to this choice the portal presentation logic can be implemented in any web technology and can be deployed on a different server. Traditional Web Services and SOAP protocol approach has been discarded in order to adopt a RESTful approach to make the Web APIs lighter and also to take advantage of some other aspects illustrated in the paper.