A Web Services Gateway for the H2O Lightweight Grid Computing Framework

H2O is a lightweight distributed component framework for the dynamic aggregation of software components, services and computational resources into Grid Computing Systems. H2O provides a powerful separation of roles clearly distinguishing providers of software components from provides of computational services, this model allows developers to easily design layered applications and to deploy them on top of dynamically aggregated computational nodes. The ease of use does not exact a weak security system, in fact, by combining the native Java sandbox model and the use of JAAS, H2O provides a robust security layer. Although H2O supports an extended version of Java RMI (RMIX) as its native inter-component communication language, the software components deployed inside an H2O virtual machine are exposed only as Java Objects. In this paper we present the H2O Web Services Gateway, a set of H2O software component capable of dynamically capturing the deployment of new software components into an H2O virtual machine and automatically generating and publishing the WSDL description of these components. This feature, combined with the use of the Web Services Invocation Framework, enables the automated export of software components deployed into an H2O virtual machine as Web Services and facilitates the integration of lightweight Grid application into Service Oriented Architectures.