Re: [Condor-devel] Writing a SAGA adaptor for Condor

["João Abecasis" <joao@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Todd,

First of all, thanks for your prompt and informative reply.

Todd Tannenbaum wrote:
> João Abecasis wrote:
> > So, while I'm still getting started, I'm looking for advice any of you
> > may have. In particular, I need to decide on the particular Condor API
> > to target.
> >
> >
>
>  Take a peek at
>   http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/slides/API/apis.ppt
>  if you haven't already... give a high-level overview of the options and the
> various pros/cons associated with each.

I have, but thanks for the link, anyway.

>  The GAHP interface only supports job submission, control, and monitoring.
> There is no way to query about the machines available, for instance.  But if
> that is all you need, it could be a good choice.  From the Condor daemon's
> point of view, it cannot tell the difference between commands arriving from
> the GAHP client or from command-line tool clients.

What do the command-line tools, themselves, use? GAHP? Is this
functionality, even if only internally, exposed as a library?

>  The command tools are not a choice to overlook, assuming you (a) can live
> with the fact that they need to be installed, (b) performance-wise you can
> live with a fork/exec everytime you want to interact w/ Condor, and (b) you
> don't rely so much on scraping their output - instead use the "-xml" or the
> "-format" options to tools like condor_q and condor_status.  After all, the
> text-output-for-humans can change from release to release.  The command-line
> option is probably the best documented and best tested, because it is how
> most users and web portals interact w/ Condor.

I don't think performance is the top priority for SAGA. Security,
portability, and ease of deployment and configuration are so.

>  SOAP is our official API.  The WSDL files are what you get in lieu of C
> libraries or what not.  They give you practically all the functionality of
> the Condor command-line tools.  However, the API is at a fairly low level -
> for some folks this is a good thing, for others it just means more work.
> Also, while working w/ SOAP is really easy w/ .NET and/or Java Axis --- it
> can sometimes be painful in other environments.

The codebase is in C++, but there is precedent in using SOAP: the
GridSAM adaptors already do, through gSOAP.

>  If I were you, I'd prolly use the command-line tools unless one of the cons
> I listed above was a show-stopper (and often they are).  Then I'd probably
> look at SOAP if I was in .NET or Java or needed more than job queue access,
> else I'd look at the GAHP.
>
>  hope this helps

It does. Thanks a lot!

Cheers,


João