IS-ENES – WP 3 D 3.1 – Report on v.E.R.C. Portal Setup and Status Abstract: Grant Agreement Number: 228203 Proposal Number: FP7-INFRA-2008-1.1.2.21 Project Acronym: IS-ENES Project Co-ordinator: Dr Sylvie JOUSSAUME Document Title: Report on v.E.R.C. Portal Setup and Status Deliverable: 3.1 Document Id N°: Version: 1.0 Date: 07.09.2010 Status: Filename: Report on v.E.R.C. portal setup and status Authors: K. Ronneberger, T. Weigel, S. Kindermann, J. Biercamp Project Classification: Public Approval Status Document Manager Verification Authority Project Approval Status: Final version This document is produced under the EC contract 228203. It is the property of the IS-ENES project and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the formal approval of the IS-ENES General Assembly REVISION TABLE Modified Modified Version Date Comments Pages Sections 0,5 Aug, 18 Initial Version 1.0 Sep, 8 Revised version; reviewers: M. Juckes & G. Riley Status: Final version This document is produced under the EC contract 228203. It is the property of the IS-ENES project and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the formal approval of the IS-ENES General Assembly Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................................... 1 2 PORTAL REQUIREMENTS AND ARCHITECTURE............................................................................... 2 2.1 REQUIREMENTS 2 2.2 PORTAL TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE 2 3 CURRENT DEPLOYMENT SETUP OF THE V.E.R.C. ............................................................................ 4 3.1 PRODUCTION SERVER 1 3.2 ERROR RECOVERY 5 3.3 DEPLOYMENT PROCESS 5 4 STATUS AND FUNCTIONALITY OF THE V.E.R.C................................................................................. 6 4.1 STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT OF THE PORTAL 6 4.2 CONTRIBUTING CONTENT TO THE PORTAL 7 4.2.1 Presenting models and tools 8 4.2.2 Integrating Community Contributions 10 4.2.3 Hosting of “seemingly independent” websites 10 4.3 EXTENDING THE PLONE FRAMEWORK 11 4.3.1 Using Plone as a frontend for Pylons Web services 11 4.3.2 Bringing AJAX to Plone 12 4.4 INTER-CONNECTING CONTENT 12 4.4.1 The IS-ENES Search and Browse Facility 12 4.4.2 The “related-content-portlet” 13 4.5 INTEGRATING EXTERNAL SERVICES 14 4.5.1 Integration of the Data Portal 14 4.5.2 Integration of further services 15 5 SUMMARY AND/OR OUTLOOK ........................................................................................................... 16 6 ACRONYMS ........................................................................................................................................... 17 Status: Final version This document is produced under the EC contract 228203. It is the property of the IS-ENES project and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the formal approval of the IS-ENES General Assembly Executive Summary This document describes the development and setup process as well as the status of the first version of the v.E.R.C. (virtual Earth system Resource Center) portal. As the portal is intended to become a community tool the focus in development and setup is placed in user-friendliness and usability as well as sustainability and easy maintenance. The portal is based on the Zope/Plone framework, a well established and maintained open source content management and web framework software, which has been extended and adapted to “Earth system modelling”-specific needs by own developments. The portal has been deployed and setup and can be accessed at the preliminary address http://plone.dkrz.de This first version of the portal acts as a skeleton, which outlines the possibilities and services offered by v.E.R.C.. In a next step it will be filled with content and tested by users from the Earth system modelling community, to outline the further course of development. Title: Report on v.E.R.C. Portal Setup and Status Version: 1.0 1 INTRODUCTION The v.E.R.C portal shall provide a platform for an integration and dissemination of tools and data for the sake of the Earth system modelling (ESM) community as well as potential external users, e.g. the impact community. A prototype of the portal has been set up, featuring a tentative content tree that reflects the principal pillars of the Earth System Modelling infrastructure: The models, the data, the computing facilities and the modelling community itself. This document focuses on conceptual and technical design issues and on the implementation of the underlying framework for the portal and the services deployed through it. Approaches to enable and foster community building and community involvement are highlighted. To ensure that the portal really meets the needs of the ENES community, it is essential to establish it as a community tool. This means that the portal had to be set up in a way so that the presented information, downloads, and services are not only comfortably accessible and usable, but also easily contributed to, extended and managed by the community. Based on an analysis of these requirements and an evaluation of the suitability of available technology choices the Zope/Plone1 framework was selected as the technological framework for the portal. Zope/Plone is well established and maintained open source content management and web framework software. As a first step add-ons were developed, that extend the framework to meet the needs of the community. These add-ons support easy contribution of content, specific to the Earth system community and provide an automatic way to highlight connections between different pieces of information presented through the portal and guide a potential user through its contents. As a demonstration how external services can be integrated into this framework, the data portal services for the distributed ESM archive, developed and maintained in SA2/JRA4, were implemented. The “generation 0” version of the portal is deployed and accessible at http://plone.dkrz.de, future generations will be accessible at an enes.org subdomain. 1 http://www.plone.org Status: revised version 1 This document is produced under the EC contract 228203. It is the property of the IS-ENES project consortium and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the formal approval of the IS-ENES General Assembly Title: Report on v.E.R.C. Portal Setup and Status Version: 1.0 2 PORTAL REQUIREMENTS AND ARCHITECTURE The Portal design started with requirements collection and analysis as well as an evaluation of available technology choices. The results are collected in two IS-ENES internal documents: • IS-ENES service specification2: requirements collection of the individual IS-ENES work packages on the portal • IS-ENES NA2 delivery plan3: portal requirements and first architecture with evaluation of some technology choices The following section summarizes the key requirements motivating the technology chosen as well as the overall portal architecture. 2.1 REQUIREMENTS • The portal makes content as well as services accessible to users, thus on the one hand it acts as a content management system and on the other hand as an integration framework for generic (web) services. In particular, the services developed within the IS-ENES project, which, e.g. provide access to the distributed ESM data archive, have to be integrated. • Managing portal content is a community effort, thus easy to use web-based content management has to be supported. This also implies support for flexible, role-based user access rights and editing workflow management. • The portal should provide a long term community building and integration perspective, thus the underlying technology framework should provide sustainability. The framework development should best be based on a large open source developer community. Additionally, the possibility should exist to get commercial support from companies that are specialised in providing services around this framework. • The portal should enable rapid prototyping and feature development to be able to flexibly react on user as well as service integration requirements. • The portal is developed as an every-day-tool for earth system modellers and should accordingly provide an appropriate level of service. We aim for guaranteed availability of approx. 95% during European office hours and approx. 75% outside office hours. Thus the setup and the underlying framework should be modular and easily maintainable. 2.2 PORTAL TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE A large variety of content management systems and web frameworks is available based on different technology and programming languages. To enable short development cycles the technology evaluation concentrated on scripting language (e.g. Python, PHP, Ruby, ..) based frameworks. Given the fact that Python is the most often used scripting language in the European climate community and that development efforts in the European Metafor4 project as well as the international ESG-CET heavily rely 2 https://is.enes.org/the-project/internal_collaboration/na2/isenes_jra4_tasks_v1_0.pdf/view 3 https://is.enes.org/the-project/internal_collaboration/na2/isenes_NA2_wp_v1_1_JoB.doc/view 4 http://metaforclimate.eu Status: revised version 2 This document is produced under the EC contract 228203. It is the property of the IS-ENES project consortium and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the formal approval of the IS-ENES General Assembly Title: Report on v.E.R.C. Portal Setup and Status Version: 1.0 on Python, Python is a logical choice for the IS-ENES portal