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In the last article in this series we took an overview of
PSEWare, the Problem Solving Environment development effort
based largely at Indiana University in Bloomington. This
week we'll begin examining the component technologies within
this interesting project.
The Virtual Collaboratorium (tm) seeks to improve on the existing methods of sharing technical information, which consists mainly of a combination of archaic file transfer protocol (FTP) and some form of e-mail. The researchers involved in this project realize that it must be possible for collaborators to view and update common repositories of source code. To handle this requirement, the Virtual Collaboratorium (tm) has as its centerpiece the Virutal Collaboratorium Broker Daemon (VCBD), which acts as a sophisticated document server. The VCBD, at its core, allows clients to see the store of documents that are needed for collaboration, and also accepts new documents and formats them for republication on a Web server. In addition, the VCBD takes advantage of the modularity of object-oriented technology to allow different researchers to add pieces of functionality as the need or desire arises. The VCBD also interfaces to the Virtual Collaboration Database (VCDB), which contains the information relevant to the collaborative project. To use the VCBD, clients "log on", they're credentials are checked, and then control is handed over to part of the collaborative package (another program). As the Virtual Collaboratorium (tm) strives to be a method for collaborative application development, it's important to have some sort of version control software in place. To accomplish this, the VCDB is partnered with the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), which is publicly available. Like other version control systems, CVS lets multiple people work on the same source code concurrently without the train wreck that might occur without some sort of authority directing the merging process. Linking CVS and VCBD allows collaborators to check in to the VCBD and be authenticated, and then issue the appropriate CVS commands. Even though this process may lead to a lot of "hands" being in the source code in a given time period, CVS provides a complete history of changes, allowing problems to be backed out and good code to be reenstated. In addition to the pieces of the Virtual Collaboratorium (tm) discussed above, there are efforts to make this product as attractive and easy to use as possible. To this end, Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article The Virtual Handshake in Scientific Computing is owned by . Permission to republish The Virtual Handshake in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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