An extensible Django-based web portal for Apache Airavata

Abstract

The Apache Airavata science gateway middleware project has developed a new web frontend for the middleware’s API based on the Django web framework and the Vue.js JavaScript framework. This new frontend has been designed to be a framework, called the Airavata Django Portal Framework (ADPF) that science gateway developers can use to customize and extend the user interface to add domain specific UI metaphors and to add gateway-specific user workflows. There are three main modes of extensibility: 1) custom scientific application execution configuration, 2) custom application results analysis, and 3) wholly custom user workflows. These modes of extensibility come out of the project’s experience working with science gateways over the years. This new framework has been put into production for the 30+ science gateways hosted by the Science Gateways as a Platform (SciGaP) project at Indiana University and several gateways have already made extensions using ADPF.