Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
database, we are able to utilise full support and maintenance services
from IT, not to mention the many years of experience and existing code
we have developed. However, the main reason for not moving to an open
source database was that this would trigger a switch of the other non-
open source piece, the chemistry engine from Symyx/Accelrys, which did
not support any of the open source databases. Changing a chemistry
engine requires a lot of testing to make sure the functionality is correct
and also a lot of change management related to the scientists who need
to change their way of working. We did not have the resources to also
handle a chemistry engine change on top of all the other technology
changes and hence decided to focus on the remaining technologies.
1.5.2 Operating system (OS)
Based on our internal programming expertise, it was natural to choose
Linux [14] as the OS for the web server component. It ensures the ability
to add the functionalities/packages needed and Linux has proven its value
in numerous powerful installations. Linux is used in 459 of the top 500
supercomputers [15] and as part of the well-known LAMP-stack [16].
In terms of Linux distributions the department's favourites are Debian
[17] based. However, it was decided to use the one delivered by our
Corporate IT group, RedHat Enterprise Linux [18], as part of their
standard Linux server offerings. Service contracts for RedHat were
already in place and we could still install the tools we needed. Corporate
IT currently run our databases and servers, handle upgrades and back-
ups while we concentrate on adding tools and perform the programming.
1.5.3 Web server
The choice of web server might have been even easier than choosing the
OS. Firstly, Apache [19] has for several years been the most used web
server in the world and is, according to the Netcraft web server survey
[20] July 2011, hosting 235 million web sites. Secondly we already had
experience with Apache as we used it to support our Perl environment.
1.5.4 Programming language
We did not choose Ruby [21] as such; we chose the web framework (see
next section), which is based on the Ruby language. Before deciding to
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