Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Its development and support community is
extensive, and users are constantly creat-
ing new modules that improve the func-
tionality of the framework.
of the same program. The modules can interact
between them, sharing data and results. Through
this interaction, they produce a complex system.
In the following subsections we describe some
of the modules we consider that have a bigger
relevance in the INOVA framework.
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Xaraya integrates perfectly with Apache
and makes use of the PHP functions.
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The privileges are managed in a modular
way, allowing different types of access de-
pending on the user, the page visited, or the
content of that page. As a result, the inter-
face can be simpler or more sophisticated
depending on the type of user.
Roles Management System
The roles module manages users, groups and roles
in Xaraya. We call users to registered individuals
on a web portal.
Several types of users were defined in our
framework. We could separate them in two main
branches: common users and administrators. A
scheme with the main type of users can be seen
in figure 2.
Due to the amount of types of users in the
web portal, we decided to use a role-based access
control (RBAC) model (Al-Kahtani & Sandhu,
2002) (Chandramouli, 2001). Using this system,
the security administration consists in that the
roles must be correctly assigned to the different
types of users, based on the capacities and the
responsibilities that they have. The security ad-
ministration is much more accessible, due to the
roles assignation to organize access privileges.
The users are categorized in groups. A group
usually gives the users in it common privileges
and properties.
In the common users we could distinguish
four main groups:
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It allows setting the content to approval be-
fore updating the webpage.
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It is compatible with Secure Socket Layer
(SSL) among other protocols, such as
LDAP. The system can be switched to SSL
mode to login, or to access certain pages
or sections.
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The edition of contents can be made using
a WYSIWYG editor, allowing publishers
to create formatted content without having
knowledge of HTML, CSS or XML.
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It supports a huge amount of types of data,
which makes the edition of contents even
simpler.
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It has a powerful templating system (called
BlockLayout), which helps to maintain
a consistent design throughout the site.
Although the code in general resides in
the PHP files, the markup that is actu-
ally displayed to the browser is stored in
the templates that the code calls. These
templates can be dynamic thanks to the
BlockLayout system: the page displayed
changes depending on the data it receives
and processes.
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Anonymous users.
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Registered users.
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Customers.
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INOVA staff.
Web portal software description
For the administrator's branch, the division
is slightly more complicated. We could define
the following general groups of administrators:
The INOVA web portal is a modular system.
This means that each part of the portal is clearly
defined, and it carries out a specific function that
may be used alone or combined with other modules
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Editors
. Those who can edit partially or
totally the web portal, add new content,
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