Notes from the Jan 21st Trip

Notes from the meeting at EMSL on Wednesday January, 21 1998:

Persons Present: Jim Myers, Keith Jackson, Robert Anderson, Pavan Auman, Travis Brooks, Eric Gage

The group met with Jim Myers for about three hours today and discussed the overall Notebook architecture and the proposed experiment form implementation. Many topics were discussed including how the overall notebook architecture is likely to change to c reate a more robust common standard for compatibility with other Collaboratories (namely Berkeley and Oakridge National Labs). We then moved on to a discussion on how the new experiment form might be implemented to communicate with the current notebook. Jim Myers introduced the concept of notebook objects (NObs) and we discussed how our experiment form will communicate with the notebook using NObs.

We started by defining what a notebook object is. The NOb is basically a hash table that includes information such as; the author, password(?), file mime-type, etc as key values inside the hash table. The actual file is stored separately, and the NOb a cts as a wrapper around the file.

Question: Does the NOb that is stored in the file system contain level and depth information?

The NobID will be the pathname of the NOb and will be defined as a string value. For example NObID = 'files/dir1/dir2".

We then began defining the system calls that the experiment form applet will send to the server. These are:

Get List of Project Spaces - returns NOb with project space info.
Authenticate (name, password)
Get Notebook File Structure
Put File
Add Nob

The applet will launch from a command line with a filename option. When the applet executes the Get List of Project Spaces call is sent to the server. A list of available project spaces will be displayed in the login window (in a pull-down menu) so tha t the user will be able to select which project space that they want to login to (This is necessary because a user can have accounts with the same login ID and password in multiple project spaces). Once the user selects a project space and enters their l ogin ID and password, the Authenticate call is sent to the server. When the user is authenticated, the applet will issue the Get Notebook File Structure call which will return a complete file structure for that particular project space. The user is now free to navigate the file structure until they decide where to put the file that they specified in the command line. Once they choose a location, the Put File call is sent to the server and the file is added to that particular directory. The add Nob cal l is used when the user want to create a new directory for their file.

Consideration: Will they be able to change the name of the file they want to upload? This is currently supported in the experiment form.

The above system calls will use a get structure and put structure methods described as:

get structure(level, depth, startNOb, usrname,

Oakridge has a similar experiment form application that is script-based and works well on system with limited storage capacity and power because of its command-line nature. Eventually, the EMSL would like to support this experiment as well.

Berkeley works with a JDBC backend and uses socket connections, remote method invocation, and CORBA to implement their experiment form.

The National Labs would like to develop a object standard that would provide for a common standard that is scalable, very flexible, and more robust.

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