June 27th Report

Axis2 Hackathon June 11th to June 16th.

We started the hackathon with the intention of cleaning up the bugs list and come with some API fixes. It was a successful hackathon and we (Srinath Perera, Eran Chinthaka, Deepal Jayasinghe, Amila Suriyaarchhi, Ajith Ranabahu, Glen Daniels, and Myself) were able to fix most of the bugs whcih were labled as blockers and do some cleanup in the API as well. Axis2 has now grown into a large project and the API changes are not very straight forward as we did one year back. It is now a process of improvement plus depreciation.

An excellent presentation on API Design.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design

C++ Agent/Service Discovery for Clarens

I was able to get the C++ client working for the Agent Discovery. The *next step* is to get the service discovery working which require both encryption and signing of messages.

Getting the exchange of messages between java and C++ was not easy with security in place. I am using openssl libraries for the C++ client and for the java side, it is the built in cryptographic extension of JDK. However, there are compatibility issues when it comes to different versions of certificates and padding schemes. So I will write a blog with complete code samples regarding the above issues after getting that *next step* completed.

June 13th Report

Started working on the C++ version of the Clarens implementation. I need to implement the client code of the proposed architecture in C++ so that both C++ and Python clients can use it.

The initial plan was to develop a version without security, but it seems like Caltech needs security in all their applications. It will not be easy to inject security related code once developed without it, so I decided to implement the complete version of the client code with security similar to the java implementation.

Currently I am implementing the above code and it is a bit of slow going process because I have to learn how to use OpenSSL libraries for security functions.

In the meanwhile I was able to schedule my Oral exam with my professors and the data I could get was 19th of July. Currently preparing for the exam as well.

May 30th Report

Continued working on the Clarens Project :

I created a python service "ping.ping" which responds to an agent's requests informing that the service is up and running and deployed it in clarens.

And also tested the following scenario;

First, a RootletSimulator(java) registers the rootlet service with an agent. (In the actual implementation this should be handled by the initialization method of the rootlet service)

After the registration, the agent will keep on pinging the rootlet service (python running on Clarens) to make sure that the service is up.

Now, if we use the ClientSimulator (java) it can discover the service and may be use the service.

Then we can stop the Clarens server or remove the rootlet service from the web-frontend (need to find out how to do this)

Now if we use the ClientSimulator(java) again, it won't discover the service, because the agent has removed the service from its list of available services.

Security Considerations:

Agent discovery request/response uses signed messages.
Service discovery request/response uses encrypted and signed messages.
*pings* use xmlrpc over http and the messages are secured using a grid-proxy.