Recipes 2.0: building for today and tomorrow

摘要

The history of science gateway development has, in many ways, been a story of the ‘Haves’ vs. thern‘Have-nots’. Large infrastructure projects led the way, building thick client portals to provide coherentrninterfaces to an incoherent environment. Contrast this with the way the modern Web is designed usingrnlight, front end components, and outsourcing much of the heavy lifting to a mash-up of REST applicationrnprogramming interfaces, and it is easy to see why modern web applications can be prototyped and refinedrninto stable products in the time it previously took thick client portals to do an initial release. This paperrnargues that a ‘build for today’ philosophy can lead to the rapid development of science gateways to servernthe ‘Have-nots’. With this philosophy in mind, we are presenting Gateway DNA, a set of responsive frontrnend components built on top of the iPlant Agave application programming interfaces. This toolkit providesrnthe boilerplate for rapid development of lightweight science gateways using only HTML, JavaScript, andrnCSS. Using Gateway DNA, developers can easily stand up new gateways or quickly add new functionalityrnto existing ones.