Florida Participation in GAE, from Haifeng Pi, 10/10/2002:

Dear Julian:

    Really appreciate for giving a thorough introduction of GEA and 
suggestions on how Florida can contribute. I am willing to work on DEA, 
which I believe represent a promising aspect for CMS computing. After the  
coming Monday's group meeting with Avery, Rick and other colleagues, I
will get more feedback to you a.s.a.p. (today and tomorrow Avery is out of
town)   

   Setting up a PostgreSQL/Clarens system is a natural start for Flroida
to actively join in GEA. A distributed query and data management tool 
based on Clarens is very important (and challenging). About this plan,
provided you can't find other candidate, it would better start after
I have necessary experience on existed tools implemented by Eric, Edwin
and Saima. I think it won't take too long time to get familiar with those
tools and the whole database/application/clarens system.

    About developing a Java version of Clarnes, it can be a long term
task. And Java Clarens may focus more on being integrated  with other
famous GRID scheduling and monitoring tools with providing the samilar 
functionality as Python clarens. BTW current Clarens is working pretty
well, and there is no urgent reason to push on a java version quickly. But
in a long term, I think a java Clarens will be very useful. A java clarens
can easily handle direct SQL database accessing and file transfering at
the same time. And it will also give much convenience to handle  
distributed query. 

    So if you don't have a urgent need for a working distributed query,
the two tasks as you sugested can be put togetther, I will
mainly make java clarens first then distributed query based on java
clarens. But if you want to have a prototype query system first, I may
need more help and discussion on how to proceed based on current system.

    Best Regard,

Haifeng