Access Grid Toolkit is a software package for enabling large-scale collaboration platform using grid technology as core infrastructure in the name of Access Grid. It is a long-term project and the development team has just released Access Grid Toolkit 3.0 last week. This is the third major release which is completely incompatible to AGTk 1.x and AGTk 2.x due to different protocol stack. The most interesting feature of AGTk 3.0 is that there is no certificate is required. In other words, Globus has been pulled out to simplify usability and stability. They seem to wait for Globus to be more mature sooner or later. Furthermore, main development moved concentration to Windows XP and Mac OS X. Linux, says Fedora and Slackware, are externally supported by Visualization Lab at University of Queensland. AGTk 3.0 also introduced the use of Bonjour. Bonjour is a zero configuration network which is automatically discovered new devices to form a bigger network transparently. It is used in AGTk 3.0 to find other hosts in an Access Grid Node automatically instead of manual adding like before. Cool! Note that Bonjour is invented by Apple. That’s why I said development moved to Mac OS X.

Anyway, I will try it first. It looks promising especially venue navigation tree.

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