The Hosting Environment Daemon (HED)

HED

The Hosting Environment Daemon is the container of all the functional components of the next generation of the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) middleware on the server side. It is the central part in a new very lightweight incarnation of ARC that is aimed at - but not limited to - providing Web Service.

The whole design of the HED is built around the idea of flexibility and modularity. Inside HED the developer or deployer is supposed to use the minimum amount of components and external dependencies only. This is why the HED mostly consists of pluggable modules with some glue among them. An example of a service hosted by HED is the Chelonia storage system.

Because in its current state it mostly provides modules for building SOAP based Web Services, it is easy to think that HED is just another Web Services development framework like Axis, gSOAP, XFire or any other out of the numerous implementations. Instead, the idea of HED is to provide framework for gluing functionalities and not a re-implementation of various standards. Effectively that means if Apache 2 Web server is considered by developers as necessary for serving as frontend to services there could be plugin written which places Apache 2 into a chain of other plugins of the HED.

In the current implementation there are no Apache or Axis plugins. That is because the developers of HED were very much concerned about making the solution lightweight and needed an implementation of those supported protocols that was both simple and lightweight. As a result essentials like SOAP and HTTP are implemented inside HED, while external software is used whenever was appropriate - as in the case of TLS, (Grid)FTP, LDAP and some other cases. That does not exclude possibility to have plugins using entirely external solutions either developed or accepted from third parties.

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