Recipes 2.0: building for today and tomorrow

SummaryThe history of science gateway development has, in many ways, been a story of the ‘Haves’ vs. the ‘Have‐nots’. Large infrastructure projects led the way, building thick client portals to provide coherent interfaces to an incoherent environment. Contrast this with the way the modern Web is designed using light, front end components, and outsourcing much of the heavy lifting to a mash‐up of REST application programming interfaces, and it is easy to see why modern web applications can be prototyped and refined into stable products in the time it previously took thick client portals to do an initial release. This paper argues that a ‘build for today’ philosophy can lead to the rapid development of science gateways to serve the ‘Have‐nots’. With this philosophy in mind, we are presenting Gateway DNA, a set of responsive front end components built on top of the iPlant Agave application programming interfaces. This toolkit provides the boilerplate for rapid development of lightweight science gateways using only HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Using Gateway DNA, developers can easily stand up new gateways or quickly add new functionality to existing ones. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.