Re: [geclipse-dev] geclipse file system resources, local and ui

[Ariel Garcia <garcia@xxxxxxxxxx>]

HI Kostas,

> Good. But i think when you started designing geclipse you thought of
> having the resources saved in UI (or some place in the grid
> infrastructure), and if so I am curious why you didn't go this way.

Well, a "UI" (using the gLite name) or the corresponding client for any 
other grid middleware, is just that, a client software which you should be 
able to _easily_ install on your desktop or laptop and access the grid 
from there. 
The fact that the gLite UI is fat and not easy to install make you think of 
it as a "central server" provided by your organization, but it shouldn't 
be that way. 
If you had a gLite UI in both your computer at home and at work, you would 
have _exactly_ the same synchronization problem as with gEclipse...


The functionality you mention, a "synchronization server" so to say, can be 
provided by any standard software like CVS, subversion, rsync, ftp, etc 
etc. This is completely orthogonal to any grid client functionality, you 
can have the two in the same machine if you want but there is absolutely 
no relationship between the two.
The only relationship i could imagine would be to upload your projects or 
workspace to some grid storage... but some version control system would be 
much more preferable....

Of course one could think about tightly integrating some sync client with 
gEclipse.... but that is currently not on our roadmap.

> We have started developing a scriptable interface (through ssh) to
> gLite. So I thought of making it compatible with geclipse, because it
> looks very well designed and usable. That's why any comment on it could
> be useful.

nice :-)
In fact you can use gEclipse as an API (java) and you can completely forget 
about the UI. So you could "script" (ie, program) on top of the gEclipse 
API... you could write an interpreter that converts your script-code to 
java method calls over gEclipse ;-)
If you do ssh to the UI then i do not see much synergy with gEclipse 
because gEclipse replaces the UI.

> That could become a tricky thing for some people. 

sure, but much more tricky for many people is using gLite from the command 
line anyway ;-)

> You could make some kind of synchronizations with the UI, save
> and restore in another pc.  

well, there are Eclipse plugins which do that for you with CVS/SVN etc
Of course you need a CVS/SVN server in that case.
And as i said above, the "UI" has nothing special in that respect.

Hope it helps, 
regards, Ariel