Rappture is the Rapid application infrastructure, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop a graphical user interface for scientific modeling tools. Once you describe the input/output for your simulator, Rappture handles the rest, generating a graphical interface automatically based on your description. Within your code, you access the input values and save resulting output values by using the Rappture application programming interface, which has bindings for a variety of languages, including C/C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Octave, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. You can embed the Rappture calls within your tool, or create a wrapper script that wraps around your tool, leaving it untouched. Either way, users will see a simple, graphical interface where they can enter input values, press the "Simulate" button, and visualize the outputs as line graphs, contour plots, 3D isosurfaces, molecules, and more. They can run your tool again and again, and explore your model within a large parameter space. The resulting application is easy to deploy on any HUBzero-powered site, so a large community of users can access it through their web browser.

This talk provides an overview of Rappture and presents the basic XML syntax used for describing tools.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Michael McLennan (2009), "Introducing the Rappture Toolkit," https://help.hubzero.org/resources/45.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. rappture
2. software development