conceptual view of i2b2 architecture

[billybob]

Hi folks -

Before asking this question, I tried, to no avail, scouring the
i2b2.org site looking for the answer. Yes, with the installation we
learn about each of the servlet containers, but I was unable to find a
good high-level architectural view.

I'm interested to know more about the conceptual view of the i2b2
architecture. In particular, why do we have gridsphere, jboss, and
tomcat instead of going with just one technology. Was this a matter
of expediency or are they all serving functionally unique purposes?

Thanks!

[aaron...@gmail.com]

Hi Brian,

The beauty of open source components is that you get a lot of free
stuff. The ugly is that sometimes the stuff you get is not exactly
what you need. In order to get i2b2 built quickly, the i2b2 team used
components, beginning with Gridsphere, a portal manager that runs on
Tomcat. Unfortunately there were database components that could not be
made to run on Tomcat, so the decision was made to use JBoss and then
run Gridsphere on JBoss. That turned out to be an unlucky decision,
since Gridsphere, it turns out, will not run on JBoss (it is possible
if you want to do some serious development and fork Gridsphere.. but
that is not i2b2's mission). So there you have the short answer:
expediency and pragmatism.

The important thing is that you can talk to the services via web
services - so from that perspective they achieved the goal - an
extensible framework where it is not important to know the platform
that a component is running on.

Post back if this is not enough info.

Aaron