Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1.5.6 Front-end
UI design is inherently diffi cult. It takes a lot of time and is rarely done
well. One can appreciate good design but it is not as easy to create. The
tools need to look good or 'professional', otherwise the users will judge
the functionality harshly. A nice looking front-end is required in addition
to correct functionality. RoR comes with a clean but also very simple UI,
but an interface with more interactivity was required (implemented using
AJAX/javascript) to enable the users to work with the data.
The javascript library Extjs [28] delivers a rich UI framework with pre-
build web tools such as grids, forms and tables that can be used to build
the special views needed for the different data types. Extjs also creates a
platform on which many external javascript tools such as structure
viewers can be incorporated via a 'plug-in' mechanism. Although Extjs is
an open source library, it is not free for all due to licence restrictions on
commercial use. However, on open source projects, developers can use
Extjs for free under a GPL [29] type licence [30].
1.5.7 Plug-ins
LSP also utilises different plug-ins for some special tasks. As an example,
the GNU Scientifi c Library (GSL) [31] is used as support for simple maths
and statistics calculations. Many of the standard calculations performed
on science data are fairly straightforward and well described, and can be
implemented with an open source math library and some internal brain-
power. With these tools, IC50-type sigmoidal curve fi tting has been
implemented using the fl ot [32] javascript library for graphics rendering
in the browser allowing scientists to see and interact with the data
(Figure 1.2).
1.5.8 Github
All the LSP code is hosted on Github [33], a low-cost (free for open
source projects) and effective site hosting software projects using the Git
source code version control system [34]. Git was, like Linux, initially
developed by Linus Torvalds [35]. It is fully distributed and very fast, and
many of the tools selected made use of Git, and were already hosted on
Github. It would therefore be easier to merge future, new code and
technologies into the code stream by also using Git. Despite the fact that
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