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PHYSICS Design Environment

The Design Environment is a graphical user interface (GUI) with the aim of helping users to get in touch with the PHYSICS solution framework, providing the tools and a GUI to simplify the development, testing and management of FaaS applications, all in one place.

The Design Environment is a graphical user interface (GUI) with the aim of helping users to get in touch with the PHYSICS solution framework, providing the tools and a GUI to simplify the development, testing and management of FaaS applications, all in one place.

Figure 1: Design Environment GUI


The GUI is a downloadable packaged solution running as docker container on the user client device. Such solution gives to the user the flexibility, at the start up of the project, to leverage the user resources and don’t necessary rely on the cloud environment, with an approach of EDGE computing[1] architecture.

The GUI is divided in two main sections: the first one is dedicated to the Node-RED[2] application that provides a browser-based editor that makes easier to wire together flows using the wide range of available nodes, even custom PHYSICS’s nodes; the second one is the Admin Panel where the tools for managing the deployed Node-RED flows are located.

In the “Admin Panel” the user can proceed to the build of the deployed Node-RED flow to make it ready for the execution in the PHYSICS platform. Then, in the “Test” section, the flow can be tested from both logical and performance point of views. The last section (“Graph”) is dedicated to the creation of the graph where the user can define an application that includes one or more flows.

The application also gives to the user the possibility to load the (not generated) custom images into the integrated Node-RED environment, which can also be located in a user’s custom repository.

The Design Environment integrates a login system based on Keycloak[3], which provides an all-in-one solution to manage the user’s Single Sign-On (SSO) to the application, i.e. the capabilities of authentication, authorization and segregation of the user workspace. The SSO feature enables the future opportunity of enforcing the security of the PHYSICS resources.

Figure 2: Design Environment Components and Interactions with other elements of the PHYSICS platform

The application interacts with the other components of the PHYSICS environment, to enable the build, testing and management of the related flow. In Figure 2, a high-level diagram of the interactions of the GUI with the other PHYSICS components is represented.


[1] Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing)

[2] Node-RED (https://nodered.org/)

[3] Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/)

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