Technologies
A founding principle of the DCC was that it would bring to bear developments in Free Software, Open Source Software and Web technologies to bear on its activities. The following are some of the software and tools used at the DCC.
- GNU/Linux The DCC servers are all GNU Linux based systems. GNU/Linux systems provide us with a solid, secure and stable environment at a fraction of the cost of other platforms. In particular, we use a hardened version of Linux developed here at Stanford University.
- Oracle We use oracle as our core database software. Oracle is the premier database program and has solid support on the Linux platform.
- Java As most of the services provided by the DCC are Web-based, we make extensive use of Java technology from Sun Microsystems.
- Apache We run the excellent Apache as our web server with SSL enabled.
- Jakarta Project tools The Jakarta project is the source for most of our development tools.
- Ant, the Java-based tool for building web applications
- Tomcat, the well-known servlet container for serving up XML, the eXtensible Markup Language tools such as the Xerces parser and the Xalan style sheet processor. In particular, we also use SVG, Batik, and FOP.
- ECS, the Element Construction Kit for generating dynamic Web pages.
- Log4j, a logging library for Java
- POI, a library for Java for dynamically generating OLE documents on the fly
- REGEXP, a regular expression library for dynamically validating form fields and building indigenous tools. We also use the GNU Regexp library.
- Taglibs, useful library of custom tags for use with Java Server Pages
- Struts, a model-view-controller framework for constructing web applications with servlets and JavaServer Pages
- GNU We use a number of Free Software Foundation tools such as Autoconf and Emacs, (with JDE ).
- R For statistical analysis, we use R, a modern statistical environment for data analysis. Using remote connection packages, we use R at the backend for generating statistical analysis and plots.
- Tigris We use design tools such as Argouml, a UML design tool with cognitive support.
- DataVision We use DataVision for generating reports.
We are also evaluating and testing a number of other software such as JBOSS, Eclipse and additional commercial tools that may not have exact open source equivalents.
Of course, there are situations when no existing software can fit the need. The DCC has developed indigenous tools in such cases to fill the need.
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