P o S(EGICF12-EMITC2)054 gridCake & gridCamp: Making the Grid easier

The Grid has shown to be a valuable technology for researchers. However, its front-ends are usually designed for users with high computational skills and they are not very user-friendly. This fact typically causes contempt to final users, because they want to focus their efforts on their researches, skipping concepts not related with their studies. Also, the tools to make software that can interact with Grid services are complex, generally poorly documented and sometimes they do not support latest Grid middleware versions. This makes very difficult to develop new user interfaces for these services friendlier than the existing ones. This work will deal about the problems with existing Grid user interfaces and development tools, and it will describe the development of a very easy to use Java library called gridCake, and a web portal called gridCamp built with gridCake, which mixes Grid functionalities with social network features