Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
deciding how to integrate Extjs with RoR, we also needed to learn how
to use the Extjs library itself most effectively.
It took time to agree/understand how to best use and integrate the
layers of the stack and we did not get to that level of understanding
without a longer period of actual coding. The current LSP code base may
not currently be structured in the best possible way for long-term support
and development, similar code structure issues are known and understood
by other developers in the community. The future direction of RoR and
Extjs are consistent with the Lundbeck team's views of the 'right way' to
structure and enhance the code in future. The team behind Extjs
recognised that they needed to implement more structure in their library
in order to support the various developers. A MVC structure is therefore
implemented in version 4 of Extjs. Hence a clean installation of the new
version of our stack is being considered, along with re-building LSP as
that will be easier, better and/or faster than trying to upgrade and adapt
our initial attempt to fi t the new version of the stack.
1.8 Implementation
It is likely that there is never going to be a 'fi nal' implementation. The
development is going to continue - hence the name Life Science
Project
- as technologies and abilities change as do the needs in terms of more
data types, analysis of the data, better ways of displaying the data, etc.
Overall, the current system looks very promising. Our group is still
happy with the choices made regarding the tools to use and LSP does
work very well. It is therefore entirely possible, and in fact very benefi cial
and cost-effective, to develop a research enterprise data management
system purely on open source tools. All parts of the technology stack
continue to develop, and Ruby, and especially RoR and Extjs, are moving
forward at high speed and adding a lot of new valuable features.
Neither scale nor speed or any other of the 'ilities seem to be an issue
with our implementation and number of users. Occasional slowness in
the front-end is due to (1) very big/complex database queries that need
optimisation or can be handled with more power on the database or (2)
Javascript rendering on the clients. This is not an issue in general but
certain (older) PCs with lack of RAM and/or certain browsers do not
render quickly enough. On a standard laptop running Windows and
using Firefox, LSP works very well.
Using Javascript (a Javascript library) as the UI has also turned out to
be a very sound idea. Javascript can be challenging to work with, but,
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