The following are referee notes on my paper and my comments: ------------------------------------------------------------ Referee 1 ******************************************* E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) My principal complaint is that the paper as submitted is very unfinished. While clearly relevant, the quality of the final paper cannot really be judged on basis of this version. The paper describes the development kit for Grid-based computational science portals, and as such fits well within the topic range of this special issue of CCP&E. The paper describes various elements of the development kit, often in great detail. In this sense the paper is somwhere between a manual (for which it has too little detail) and a paper describing the concepts (where the level of detail becomes confusing). >>I agree-- I tried to rewrite various sections with a greater emphasis on the >>architecture and less technical detail that looked like a README Sadly, the bibliographic references in the body of the paper were empty, which doesn't help in reviewing. >>Fixed that In section 2 (Overview of the Grid Portal Development Kit), the author briefly mentions cookies and says that they will be discussed in more detail in section 2.1. I can't find any mention of cookies in there. >> Fixed that Section 4 appears to be (partly?) missing (See below). >> Yep-- fixed that F: Presentation Changes The paper doesn't use the right style for typesetting and the figures are of unsatisfactory quality. >> Fixed that Either there's something wrong with section numbering, or some pages are missing. Namely, there is no section 4, section 3 (GPDK as a portal development environment) is followed immediately by section 5 (Related work). The quality of the figures is poor. >> Redid all the diagrams completely I spotted several typos in section 2.3.2 (Job Submission) and 2.3.3 (File Transfer): "GSI enhance", "idf", "succesfully", "coommand". >> Fixed all typos (I hope! ) More references are needed - e.g. for ANT >> Added more info and citation for ANT Referee 2 ******************************************* D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only) ------------------------------------ This is a very good paper, well written. Technical ideas are good and timely, with enough information given so the reader can understand what was done. I particularly appreciate that he cited other related work, and in general references are sufficient (better than average). E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) ------------------------------ F: Presentation Changes (minor) font size in figures should be larger (minor) should give web address of GPDK home page? >> Provide web address for GPDK and font size should be fixed by using CPE template Referee 3 ******************************************* E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) ------------------------------ This paper describes a development toolkit for building grid portals for applications. The toolkit is built on top of Globus middleware using Java. The paper is restricted to discussing features of Java that the toolkit used. For example, most of the meaty Section 2 is devoted to describing server pages, servlets and Java beans. While such a discussion is certainly necessary, it should not be the major focus of this paper. Instead, the paper should bring out interesting grid-related issues in the development of the toolkit. Likewise, it's not clear what the reader is supposed to glean from Section 3. The section does not show techniques by which the toolkit can be used by others; it does not show how the toolkit was used in example; it does not contain any evaluation metrics for the toolkit or portals developed using it. Perhaps the missing Section 4 contained all of these points, but since I did not receive a Section 4 (and couldn't tell if a Section 4 existed, because pages were unnumbered), I can't evaluate the work presented here. >> Excellent points made here-- I've tried bringout out more Grid related issues by employing examples of scientific collaborations. I now explain exactly how the GPDK is used for generated new portals as well as a new diagram. In general, when presenting Related Work (Section 5), the aim is to compare and contrast the work in the paper with others' work in the same area. In this paper, Related Work is used to describe invocations of the toolkit. In other words, Section 5 is more a Deployment section than a Related Work section. No related work is presented in the paper. >> Good point-- I've gone back and redid this section to discuss a competing grid portal development project, GridPort and compare the two. From my reading of the paper, I understand that developing a grid toolkit is an important task. I believe that the toolkit developed by the author is probably a useful one. However, the presentation of the toolkit in this paper leaves much to be desired. F: Presentation Changes There are several suggestions for improving the presentation in this paper: * Fill the empty citations. Currently, they are all "[]", which is extremely shoddy. >> Done * Improve the grammar. There are several split infinitives ("to better utilise"), run-on sentences (page 2, middle para, 2nd sent.), missing hyphens ("... for building customised application-specific portals..." - hyphen added by me), disagreement in numbers ("All other resources... forms the third tier"), missing commas ("e.g.," - comma added by me), incorrect usage ("is comprised of"), etc. >> Done * Remove informalisms. Phrases such as "tweaking of the web pages", "at the heart of", "on the fly", etc. should be replaced by appropriate technical phrases that describe the concept better. >> Yes I agree-- fixed those * Correct spelling and capitalisation errors. "coomand", "idf", "cpu", etc. >> Done * Insert missing components. Blank sites, missing Figure 1, missing Section 4, Related Work, etc. >> Done * Define terms before usage. "ANT", "idf", etc. >> Done