Re: Looking For Direction
On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, JC wrote:
The equipment at the lab is antiquated. I would say the server is
pushing twenty years old. The network O/S is an unsupported version of
Netware (5.0 I think).
I can see this being the biggest problem in moving forwards. Are you using
IPX? Are there applications which depend on IPX or Netware? File sharing
and so on? Would the network be able to move to TCP/IP, with, say, CIFS
for file sharing?
Although we do nightly backups I have to say I probably wouldn't know
what to do should a restore be needed.
Find a very elderly Oracle DBA!
Anyway, I believe they are at a point where they are in need of an
equipment upgrade. I do believe that the LIS should also be redone.
What I am looking for is someone to point me in the right direction in
regards to resources.
Okay, first things first, try to avoid rewriting the LIMS from scratch
yourself.
(You say LIS - i was raised to call these things LIMS; maybe a US/UK
difference?)
Have a look for free, open-source LIMS implementations. Here's one:
http://bika.sourceforge.net/
There may be others. Although a quick google wasn't promising - i remember
there being a lot of noise about making open-source LIMSes in the academic
community several years ago, so it's disappointing but not surprising to
see that nothing much has happened.
If nothing looks suitable, at least think about building your LIMS on top
of something which exists. I suppose one extreme of this is building it on
top of a J2EE app server, which i tend to think of as 'writing it
yourself' because i take things like transactions, request mapping, and
connection pooling for granted. But you can raise the level by building on
top of a portal system, or a content-management system, or a workflow
system or something. Of course, if none of those are good fits for your
outcome, you may give yourself more work by doing that than it would take
to build what you need on top of plain J2EE, so be careful there.
I need to learn what is out there; tools, etc. that are used today. I
don't expect anyone to give me answer; just point me in the direction of
resources (websites, books, magazines, etc) that would enable me to
learn about options available today for software development.
I think others have given you good answers there. Java 1.6, J2EE as a
container, JPA as a persistence mechanism. You have several choices for
web interface frameworks, none of them really great, IMHO.
Off the top of my head, I am thinking of a Unix based version of Oracle
for the DBMS.
I doubt you need what Oracle gives you over PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is
excellent and free.
For the user interface I am thinking of something that is integrated
with a web browser.
Spot on.
As others have mentioned, there are lots of frameworks for building web
UIs. Alternatively, if you fancy something really clicky and interactive,
but quite un-web-like, you could look into GWT:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
It gives you an AWT-like programming model, but compiles to dynamic HTML
which runs in the browser and talks to java on the webserver via AJAX.
It's a bit of a Heath-Robinson concept, but it works surprisingly well.
tom
--
Mathematics is the door and the key to the sciences. -- Roger Bacon