JGridstart/Developers

JGridstart is an open source project, licensed under the GPL (version 2 or later). It was developed at Nikhef as part of the BiG Grid project.

• Official releases
• active SVN branch (web access)
• Latest development build (java web start file)
  • interfaces with a test certificate authority to avoid interfering with operations
• Mantis bug tracker
• Hudson continuous integration server, doing automated builds and testing
• jGridstart GForge project, currently the forum may be used

Developer documents

• On jGridstart's authentication processes
• Javadoc is built automatically
• Used technologies
• Notes on browser certificate installation
• What's inside the ~/.globus directory
• How BouncyCastle is used together with Java Web Start
• Notes on Java user agent strings
• See which client certificate is installed in your web browser
• Cumberless strong PKCS#12 cryptography using PKCS12KeyStoreUnlimited
• Other notes, and remarks of RAs

Building from source

JGridstart is being developed in a subversion repository: active SVN branch (web access). To build the latest trunk from source, make sure that you have installed a Java development environment, Ant, and Graphviz (for the Javadoc diagrams; make sure dot is in your path), then run:

 svn checkout https://ndpfsvn.nikhef.nl/repos/pdpsoft/branches/nl.nikhef.jgridstart-flyingsaucer/nl.nikhef.jgridstart
 cd nl.nikhef.jgridstart
 ant dist

This results in signed JAR in the subdirectory deployment, together with java web start related files. When developing, one can run jGridstart from the in-tree class files using the shellscript jgridstart.sh (or jgridstart.bat on Windows).

Related websites

• Certificate Authority Operations WG
• Related software
  • Certificate Management Wizard is a wizard for setting up the grid; much more complex than jGridstart both in functionality and user-interface.
  • Grid Tools
  • SpectroGrid2 with a java web start based certificate manager (also here)
  • JaBaCATs Java Basic Certificate Authority Tools
  • Portecle - GUI to create, manage and examine keystores, keys, certificates, requests, revocation lists and more.
  • KeyTool IUI the cryptography GUI tool
  • gridshib-ca contains a java web start tool that installs user certificates
  • Grix is a Java gui application to help users handle security related tasks within a grid environment
  • CSRGenerator is a Java gui wizard to submit a CSR, implementing a subset of jGridstart's features
  • libbrowser is a Java library for accessing Internet Explorer and Mozilla keystores read/write(!) using native calls to dll/so.