Glossary

A Content Management System (CMS) is a framework on which to build a dynamic website that provides easy access for you to modify or update content yourself.

MSS has adopted the award winning open source Joomla package as its standard state of the art CMS platform. With CMS you can:

• Maintain the content yourself.
• Have free advanced website features.
• Easily add extra plug-in functionalities whenever you need them.

In modern websites visitors see the front-end, while the publishers access the back-end to create the content. This is the essence of a CMS. There is no need to have a programmer modifying coding or tinkering with the design every time a change is needed. The flexibility of the platform makes it well suited for a website of any size, from a personal page to a large corporate portal with almost unlimited expandability.

Because it is open source, Joomla is available free of charge and supports a wide range of add-in modules that can be selected to tailor your website to your exact specifications. If a module to match your precise requirements is not available, we can build it for you.

We have adapted the Joomla CMS as the fundamental platform of the MSS Smart Start™ websites and linked to a standard maintenance package including hosting and domain registration, it forms a complete packaged solution now and into the future.

• It is more cost effective to build and maintain even the simplest website on a ready-made CMS framework than to design and hand code it from scratch.
• We can convert existing static websites to a dynamic Joomla based Smart Start™ website, or create a new template to your specifications, adding your company logo, colours and branding identifiers.
• Any software systems that you already have linked through your website can be integrated with the Joomla CMS through custom extensions or modifications.

PHP is a scripting language designed for producing dynamic web pages. It is widely-used, general-purpose and is especially suited to web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, which is configured to take PHP code as input and create web page content as output.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colours, fonts, and layout. This separation improves content accessibility, provides more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enables multiple pages to share formatting, and reduces complexity and repetition in the structural content.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css

The Java programming language was designed for use in embedded consumer-electronic applications by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. After several years of evolution, use of the language was directed to the Internet. It is a general-purpose concurrent class-based object-oriented programming language, specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It allows application developers to write a program once and then be able to run it everywhere on the Internet.

It is now amongst the most powerful and versatile programming languages widely used in not only internet applications but also, in software applied to mobile devices, imaging equipment, electronic control systems, financial information systems.

The Spring Framework is a Java-based open source application framework. It provides convenient and very powerful functions that use Java to solve boilerplate problems, leaving the developer to make use of these pre-built utilities to develop robust application quickly. Some of the common core components of Spring are:

• Aspect-oriented programming: enabling implementation of cross-cutting routines
• Data access: working with relational database management systems on the Java platform using JDBC and object-relational mapping tools
• Transaction management: unifies several transaction management APIs and coordinates transactions for Java objects
• Model-view-controller: an HTTP and Servlet-based framework providing hooks for extension and customization
• Authentication and authorization: configurable security processes that support a range of standards, protocols, tools and practices via the Spring Security sub-project (formerly Acegi).
• Testing: support classes for writing unit tests and integration tests

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Framework

The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an open source software project that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for rich client and web applications, especially those based on Java and J2EE. BIRT is a top level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community.

The project's stated goals are to address a wide range of reporting needs within a typical application, ranging from operational or enterprise reporting to multi-dimensional online analytical processing (OLAP). Initially, the project has focused on and delivered capabilities that allow application developers to easily design and integrate reports into applications.

The project is supported by an active community of users at BIRT Exchange and developers at the Eclipse.org BIRT Project page.

BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the Eclipse IDE for creating BIRT Reports, and a runtime component for generating reports that can be deployed to any Java environment. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used standalone to integrate charts into an application.

BIRT Report designs are persisted as XML and can access a number of different data sources including SQL databases, JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects,POJOs, XML and Web Services.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project

JavaScript is a scripting language used to enable programmatic access to objects within other applications. It is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript to develop dynamic websites. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to look like Java, but to be easier for non-programmers to work with.

Programming with JavaScript is most effective when used in conjunction with a JavaScript programming framework such as MooTools, jQuery, Prototype or Scriptaculous.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a mechanism that enables dynamic client-server content to transfer seamlessly with minimal delay. It significantly reduces the communication burden through the internet, saving bandwidth and, crucially, making more efficient use of slow internet infrastructure.

OpenClinica is an open-source data collection system for clinical trial management developed by Akaza Research in Boston, Massachussets. The project is gaining momentum as it is being used around the world. MSS helped the FEAST Trial at KEMRI, Kilifi to adopt the software and set it up for use in the trial.

The system is tailored in a manner that users can customise it, and intergrate it with their existing systems and infrastructure. Thus making the system extensible and increasing transparency in data migration, workflows and reliable intergration of existing applications for better data collection and management.

For more information, visit the OpenClinica website on : http://www.openclinica.org/