Ecce - a problem-solving environment's evolution toward Grid services and a Web architecture

The Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment (Ecce), an innovative problem-solving environment, was designed a decade ago, before the emergence of the Web and Grid computing services. In this paper, we briefly examine the original Ecce architecture and discuss how it is evolving to incorporate both Grid services and components of the Web to increase its range of services, reduce deployment and maintenance costs, and reach a wider audience. We show that Ecce operates in both Grid and non-Grid environments, an important consideration given Ecce's broad range of uses and user community, and discuss the strategies for loosely coupled components that make this possible. Both in-progress work and conceptual plans for how Ecce will evolve are presented. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.