Design and Development of a Compound DSS for Laboratory Research - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 489

5.1.3 Web server
Web server is the computer system responsible for processing requests from the client (Web
browser) and transmitting the data in a network environment (Intranet, Internet), typically
using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). Processing request means sending the web
pages in the form of an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) document. Transmitted data
can be static (prearranged data files, so called static content) or dynamic (dynamic content).
Dynamic content is created on the client's request at the server side using different
technologies (Perl, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, etc.).
The proposed DSS will solely use the dynamic content. Technology used for creating the
dynamic content will depend on the functions of the selected web server. Without a
doubt, the most common open source web server is Apache. Other commonly used web
servers are Roxen, Savant Server and nginx. There are also a number of web servers based
on Java 2 .
5.1.4 Graphical user interface
GUI is a very important part of the application. The quality of the user interface, its
simplicity and clarity, significantly affects user's acceptation or rejection of the application.
For creation of a graphical interface of proposed DSS, dynamic web pages displayed using
web browser will be used. This solution is a logical consequence of the requirement for
accessibility of DSS via intranet or internet.
Good possibility for building the whole DSS application is using of Integrated Development
Environment (IDE), such as Eclipse or NetBeans. Both of these IDEs are Java based and
support multiple programming languages. Eclipse can be used to develop applications in
Java, C/C++, COBOL, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, and Scheme. NetBeans
includes all the tools needed for creation of professional desktop, enterprise, web, and
mobile applications with the Java platform, as well as C/C++, PHP, Python, JavaScript,
Groovy, Ruby, and others.
5.2 An overview of DSS for organic semiconductors research
The laboratory research of organic semiconductors, as well as any other research, produces
relatively large amount of data in the form of measured values, information about
measurement's properties and conditions and information about observed subjects. On the
other hand, it also produces knowledge, either explicit or directly visible, or hidden in the
data. To make the research efficient and effective, the data and knowledge have to be
managed and used in an appropriate form. These reasons lead to development of a web-
enable compound DSS which combines elements and characteristics of data-driven and
knowledge-driven decision support system.
The objectives for development of the decision support system for laboratory research were
build the system in-house and use only free or open source applications and tools. That
leads to investigation and testing of several applications which were supposed to be suitable
for DSS development. The most of them are already mentioned in previous sections. An
overview of applications, tools, and techniques used for development of a compound DSS
for organic semiconductors research is given below.
2 For more details see http://Java-source.net/open-source/web-servers