The Clarens Web Services Architecture

Clarens is a Grid-enabled web service infrastruture implemented to augment the current batch-oriented Grid services computing model in the Compound Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the LHC. Clarens servers leverage the Apache web server to provide a scalable framework for clients to communicate with services using the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. This framework provides security, session persistent storage, service standards wherever possible instead of inventing new standards. This paper describes the basic architeture of Clarens, while a companion paper describes clients and services that take advantage of this architecture. More information and documentation is also available at the Clarens web page at http://clarens.sourceforge.net.