Accelerating science gateway development with Web 2.0 and Swift

A Science Gateway is a computational web portal that enables scientists to run scientific simulations, data analysis, and visualization through their web browsers. The major problem of building a science gateway on TeraGrid is how to deploy scientific applications rapidly on computational resources and expose these applications as web services to scientists. In this paper we propose a novel science application framework that can greatly accelerate the development cycle of science gateway systems. This framework enables science gateway developers to import their domain-specific scientific workflow scripts and generate Web 2.0 gadgets for running these application workflows and visualizing the output from workflow executions without writing any web related code. By assembling these application-specific gadgets and some common gadgets predefined in the framework for workflow management, developers can easily set up a customized computational science gateway to meet community requirements. We demonstrate the utility of the framework with an example from computational biochemistry.