Over at The Grid Computing Weblog, Ovais Khan explains the GDT feature. “The Grid Development Tools (GDT) feature is a bundle of Eclipse Plugins useful for Service and Application Development in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. Apart from using GDT in the Eclipse Workbench interactively, we support using Eclipse headless, i.e. running the GDT tools as commandline tools, offering the possibility to including them in automated build scripts. The GDT supersedes development of the eclipse plugin and the old command line service generator,” he says.

Developers can choose between different model sources such as annotated java classes or UML2 models of the application they intend to build. “We have already defined an ECORE Meta Model for the upper layer platform specific model (UL-PSM) of a grid application. This upper layer model holds all grid specific information about an application. The meta model of the UL-PSM is an abstraction of grid computing platform, away from concrete target platform implementations such as Globus, MAGE or Unicore. Transformation from the UL-PSM to executable code on a target platform is defined by the Target Platform Mapping Model,” he adds.

The current version of GDT, 1.0.6, is available for download.