UDA

UDA (Universal Data Access) is a client-server infrastructure designed to enable the reading and passing of heterogeneous data format back to a client in a universal data format.

Architecture

The architecture can be seen in the figure below and is described in more detail in the sections below. UDA exists in both a client-server and fat-client forms. The client-server form allows for remote servers to be connected to over TCP sockets, whereas the fat-client form requires the data to be accessible from the locally run plugins.

UDA supports SSL certificate based authentication.

UDA architecture

UDA fat-client architecture

Server

The server runs behind xinetd which handles load balancing and creation of UDA server processes on demand. Each client socket connection is paired with a new UDA process, with that process living until the client socket is closed or until the server times out.

Plugins

The server (or fat-client) dynamically loads a set of plugin libraries during initialisation. These plugins define the functionality available to server to handle data access requests.

Client

The client is responsible for passing the user data request to a remote server and making the returned data available.

Fat-client

The fat-client is a combination of the client and server code and handles the data access request using locally available plugins instead of passing the request to a remote server.

Installing

Information about installing a UDA client (including the pyuda Python wrapper) can be found here.

Information about installing and configuring a UDA server can be found here.

Development

Information about developing new plugin functionality can be found here.

Information about general development of the UDA code can be found here.