Unifying access to services: ESO's User Portal

摘要

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is in the process of creating a central access point for all services offered to its user community via the Web. That gateway, called the User Portal, will provide registered users with a personalized set of service access points, the actual set depending on each user's privileges. Correspondence between users and ESO will take place by way of "profiles", that is, contact information. Each user may have several active profiles, so that an investigator may choose, for instance, whether their data should be delivered to their own address or to a collaborator. To application developers, the portal will offer authentication and authorization services, either via database queries or an LDAP server. The User Portal is being developed as a Web application using Java-based technology, including servlets and JSPs.