Flexibility and user-friendliness of Grid portals: the PROGRESS approach

Web portals are one of the possible ways to access the remote computing resources offered by Grid environments. Since the emergence of the first middleware for the Grid, works have been conducted on delivering the functionality of Grid services on the Web. Many interesting Grid portal solutions have been designed help organize remote access to Grid resources and applications from within Web browsers. They are technically advanced and more and more widely used around the world, resulting in feedback from the community. Some of these user comments concern the flexibility and user‐friendliness of the developed solutions. In this paper we present how we addressed the need for a flexible and user‐friendly Grid portal environment within the PROGRESS project and how our approach facilitates the use of the Grid within Web portals. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.