Toward GRIDLE: a way to build grid applications searching through an ecosystem of components

Today, the development of Grid applications is considered a nightmare, due to lack of Grid programming environments, standards, off-the-shelf software components, etc. Nonetheless, several researchers believe that economic principles will guide the future development of the Grid: an open market of services and resources will become available to developers, who will choose to use computing time and software solutions from different vendors, sold at different prices, with different performance and QoS. Standardization efforts on component models, integration platforms, and business domain concepts based on XML will accelerate the usage and spreading of blocks for building component-based Grid services and Grid applications. We can expect that, in a very near future, there will be thousands of open-market components available on the Grid. Grid programming will consist of selecting, coordinating and deploying components chosen from this large software market: the problem will be to find the best component that fits the requirements and with the best performance/price trade-off.