The XB Bio-Integration Suite:
Software Architecture
XB Bio-Integration Suite™ is currently built upon open standards-based Microsoft® technologies with an intuitive, Windows-based graphical user interface for immediate application in the lab. XB employs a three-tier architecture, built on the Microsoft .NET framework, as shown in figure 1 below. The XB client application is a "rich" WinForms program installed on the user's desktop computer. Alternatively, the client may be installed on a terminal server and accessed via remote desktop in order to simplify deployment. The XB server application is hosted by Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and communicates with the client via .NET Remoting over HTTP. Windows authentication is employed to prevent unauthorized access to the server. Both Oracle 11g and Microsoft SQL server relational databases are supported in the data tier. Integration with other data services, such as Oracle EHA, is provided on this tier by customized extract/transform/load (ETL) applications.
Figure 1: XB-BIS architecture
This 3-tier architecture provides offer numerous benefits, including:
Client Tier
- Rich Winform user experience for interactive graphics
- High performance with large data sets
- Winform is typically deployed in a Citrix or Terminal Services as a remote application to centralize and manage deployment
- Import/export data from the client
- All client communication is through the application tie
Application Tier
- Open SOA architecture
- 90% of the services are stateless for ease of maintenance and scalability
- Statistical computations and algorithms are performed on the application tier
- Extensible; able to plug in other statistical libraries
- Uses Windows authentication so users can use their existing domain user accounts—single sign-on
Data Tier
- Deploy using SQL server 2008 or Oracle 11g
- Research data is protected using domain controller groups