Prototyping

The project believes in rapid development which includes an number of throw away prototypes. Previous prototyping stages included experimenting with various Grid and Web Service middleware layers. Current prototyping is focusing on various functionality and transport issues.

Event Broker

We are currently developing several prototype event brokers for the IVOA's VOEvent Working Group as part of the effort to standardise the transport of event notifications in the era of the Virtual Observatory (VO). As part of this process we are currently experimenting with several additional transport protocols, including SOAP and the new VOTech PLASTIC protocol.

RAPTOR Gateway

We have developed an prototype gateway between the peer-to-peer architecture of the eSTAR network and the hierarchical architecture of the Los Alamos TALONS project. This is currently in a testing phase of operation and should "go live" within a few months.

Plastic

The eSTAR project is currently involved in the standardisation and prototyping of various PLASTIC clients, and is in the process of back-porting the emerging standard into the current deployed software to increase the flexibility of the agent framework.