Development of a Native Cross-Platform iRODS GUI Client

Abstract

This paper describes activities on the research IT infrastructure development project at the University of Jyväskylä. The main contribution is a cross-platform iRODS client application with a rich graphical user interface. The client application is fully native and builds from a single C++ codebase on all of the platforms on which iRODS 4.0 is supported. The application has a responsive UI with native look & feel and enables drag & drop integration to the desktop. This is made possible by basing the development of the client application on top of the Qt 5 framework and an object-oriented C++ framework for iRODS which is being developed with the client application. The objectoriented framework wraps around the native iRODS 4.0 C/C++ client API library and provides object-oriented interfaces to iRODS protocol operations e.g. a fully object-oriented iRODS General Query (GenQuery) interface used by the client application has been implemented in this C++ framework. By developing on top of the native C/C++ iRODS API library, the plugin architecture of iRODS 4.0 can be fully leveraged in authentication (e.g. Kerberos) and network transport (e.g. SSL) modules without any additional complexity.