GCube System documentation wiki

The main gCube System documentation source is the gCube wiki GCube Documentation.

The documentation wiki has been customized in order to satisfy a number of functional and non-functional requirements of the system:

• Write access is allowed only to authorized members of the Project. The wiki has been integrated with a central LDAP server, which contains the list of authorized users that can access and alter the contents of the site
• Communication between the web server and the end-user browser is SSL encrypted. This ensures the confidentiality of communication during credential exchange
• The same wiki installation is used to host all gCube wikis. Source code customization was required to ensure that all of them can be co-hosted in the same server with no conflicts

Depending on the end-user community requirements, the contents of the wiki site will be made available in various other formats, to facilitate redistribution and of line browsing. Among them, HTML files, PDF and MS Word doc files will be among the probable choices.

There are three guides available for the gCube System intended for three different stakeholders (System Administrators, Users and Developers):

• Administrator’s Guide – Provides detailed instructions for installing and initializing a gCube based VRE. Includes information about external dependencies, known issues, incompatibilities, specific platform details etc. Offers guidelines and documentation for the every day administration and upgrading of the deployed infrastructure.

• User’s Guide – Targeted towards the VRE end-users. Provides instructions for using the VRE's end-user facilities, especially concerning the available User Interfaces (web portals, portlets etc). The document should also reference known problems, limitations, problem reporting etc.

• Developer’s Guide – Documents technical-oriented information that will help developers further extend and exploit gCube and gCore systems' source code. The Developer’s manual will accompany the components' API documentation providing examples, good practices and common pitfalls when using them. The manual will also include whatever other implementation information was omitted in the source code documentation like for instance detailed references regarding the algorithms used and the theory applied for the component implementation. The document will target two classes of programmers:
  • Those who want to reuse the code – Programmers who will use gCube and gCore libraries to build their own tools, without need to have access to the source code.
  • Those who want to modify/extend the source code – Programmers who will use the platforms' source code to extend it, fix it and/or port it to different environments and applications domains.

Finally, all three guides are structured in a how-to-do fashion, having all the documented components grouped into a set of turotials. In this way, it's easier for the Users, the Administrators and the Developers to perform necessary routine jobs easier.