GFAL

Today, I have started to get familiar with the GFAL package. I had a discussion with Rémi Mollon who is the actual package owner, and will stop maintaining the package in October.

GFAL provides a POSIX-compliant C and Java API to access data in grid environment. An important package is based on GFAL: the LCG Util package, that is maintained together with GFAL, in fact.

We had an idea to merge some components of FTS and GFAL, especially the SRM access layer. In FTS, it is the org.glite.data.srm-utils-cpp component, written in C++. In GFAL, it is written in C. Re-implementing org.glite.data.srm-utils-cpp on top of the GFAL SRM access layer would be benefical:

- Maintaining would be much easier
- There are several features that are under development now, and must be implemented in both packages (for instance, exponential backoff for failed or long requests, see FTS Request; there is a similar GFAL Request).
- org.glite.data.srm-utils-cpp has good unit test coverage -> the appropriate GFAL code would also be tested better if we execute the FTS test suite.

TODO: I need to check the feasibility of the above idea before proposing anything. So, in the next days, I will do the following on GFAL side:

- Organize a coffee with the responsibles from the experiments :)
- Set up a GFAL development environment
- Compile, run the tests, solve the complications coming from certificates, security, etc.
- Re-implement SrmLs on top of the GFAL SRM access layer (this is the most heavily used SRM call in FTS)
- Execute the FTS tests.