Components of the NDS

[Matthew Turk <matthewturk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been trying to work through in my head, and on paper, how the
various components can tie together.  I've spoken with Ian Taylor this
morning, and he's been doing quite a lot of work that can be used for
frontends, and after the hackathon last week we have lots of
backend+frontend work, and I know that Randy, SteveT and the MDF team
have really been pushing hard on their front.  But I'm sort of stuck
with how to take this to the next step and build out and interoperate
the necessary components.

For instance, for the astro pilot, it's not 100% clear to me how to
build on things developed elsewhere, or how to swap out components.
There are things I've been working on which might be of use elsewhere,
but I'm not sure how to make them available in a useful way.  And,
what services does Globus provide that I should utilize, or integrate
with, is another overarching question.

I tried to boil this down to a few questions which will maybe spur discussion:

 * What technical components are there for the NDS?  i.e., does it go
all the way down to the filesystem, or does it stop at the web
interface?
 * Really, what is the astro pilot for NDS?  And by this I mean, where
should the "astro" part stop, and the "NDS" part start?
 * Related to that, can the MDF implementation share components with
the astro pilot?
 * What can the *very next* steps be?  Based on the things developed
at the hackathon and in other venues, how can we move forward
efficiently?

Really, the underlying question here is: what does "NDS" mean, and how
do our implementations map into the consortium?

Thanks, and I look forward to figuring this out a bit together.  It
would be nice to figure out a way to say, "if you clone this repo, you
will have [service X] which can tie into [service Y] and then you can
develop [service Z] on top of them."

-Matt