Bioteam Software Ltd.

GENIS contained 3 parts: a front end, a back end and a DBMS.The front end was a standard web browser that allowed the user via Internet to connect the Kelman web server and join the GeneNetwork discussion forum. The back end was the Kelman web server the GeneNetwork application was running on. The web server was an Apache web server running under Linux. The back-end application was a Java application that supported the business logic and the connection to the DBMS. The user requests coming from the front end were processed in the back end application, converted to a set of Database queries and sent to the DBMS through JDBC. On the way back the queries results were analyzed by the back end application, visualized and sent back to the front end using the Java RMI protocol. The DBMS could run on a separate machine. The main purpose of the DBMS was to manage the forum data. Using SSL the application could afford a high level of security transmitting data through the Internet. The user interface was realized by HTML pages created by the web server application (CGI scripts, Java Servlets), based on data served by queries on the DBMS. To reach a user-friendly visualization of data Java-script components were used. Back end application: the back end application ran on the web server and is a mediator between the data and the client. (Programmed in Java). Using JDBC allowed flexibility to the type of database. The programming of the components had to correspond to the layer model. The client received only a graphic surface. The web server application consisted of modules that: constructed the user surface, queried the database, performed internal calculations and data analyzing. DBMS: all data (postings, views, and user data) were saved in the database. For supporting the consistence of data, access and data security, the keeping of data outside the DBMS was not allowed. The DBMS served an excellent tool for consistent keeping and manipulating of data. In order to reach flexibility against the used DBMS, GENIS was implemented to use pure SQL language without server dependent extension if possible. The goal from the beginning was that GENIS should work with two of the most popular DBMS servers - DB2 and Oracle as well on MySQL.

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