Generating web-based user interfaces for computational science

摘要

Scientific gateways in the form of web portals are becoming the popular approach to share knowledge and resources around a topic in a community of researchers. Unfortunately, the development of web portals is expensive and requires specialists skills. Commercial and more generic web portals have a much larger user base and can afford this kind of development. Here we present two solutions that address this problem in the area of portals for scientific computing; both take the same approach. The whole process of designing, delivering and maintaining a portal can be made more cost-effective by generating a portal from a description rather than programming in the traditional sense. We show four successful use cases to show how this process works and the results it can deliver.