Software

The COG scientific workspace is a web application based upon Django, which is a Python web framework that encourages rapid development, clean separation of application layers, and combination of modular applications. Django applications are backed by a configurable relational database back-end, which in this case was chosen to be SQLLite.

Additionally, the COG scientific workspace integrates many Django-based applications that are developed by the community and freely available as open-source pluggable modules, specifically:

• django.contrib.admin: module for general site and user administration.
• django.contrib.auth: module for user authentication and access control.
• django-tinymce: module for using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor with Django forms and models.
• django.core.signals: module for notification exchange between different components of a Django application, specifically used to log all workspace activity.
• django.contrib.comments: module for attaching user generated comments to any Django model (in this case, web pages and blogs).
• south: module for managing database migration schema between successive application releases.
• layouts: module for organizing the web pages layouts and content, based on the Blueprint CSS framework.

Additionally, the COG application is currently using some elements of the Yahoo User Interface framework (YUI) as Javascript and Ajax libraries.