Rapid Application Development Framework Research Articles

COCOFUEL: A Microcontroller-Based Biodiesel Production Machine

In the global landscape, the coconut stands out, with over 61 million tons harvested annually, yielding approximately 75 coconuts per tree annually. Recognizing its multifaceted benefits, including its suitability as a biofuel, various countries have endeavored to develop biodiesel production machines, each employing distinct methodologies and chemical compositions. Central to these efforts has been the drive to optimize production efficiency while minimizing costs, encompassing chemical inputs, procedural complexity, and energy consumption. This project undertook the design and implementation of a microcontroller-based machine tailored exclusively for biodiesel production via the transesterification method, utilizing coconut oil, methanol, and a catalyst. Adopting the Rapid Application Development framework, the project unfolded through iterative cycles, encompassing analysis, design, prototyping, testing, and refinement. The machine’s core functionalities were orchestrated by the Arduino Mega microcontroller, orchestrating the operation of washer motors, solenoid valves, and the heating rod, complemented by a relay, Bluetooth module, and voltage regulator. Thorough testing and evaluation underscored the machine’s reliability and efficacy in producing biodiesel from coconut oil, marking a significant stride toward renewable en ergy advancement. This accomplishment not only heralds progress in green energy solutions but also offers a compelling response to the environmental imperatives associated with conventional diesel fuels. The potential for reduced carbon emissions and the promotion of environmental sustainability amplifies the significance of this development, charting a course toward a greener future through the synergy of natural resources and cutting -edge technology.

A lightweight rapid application development framework for biomedical image analysis

Biomedical imaging analysis typically comprises a variety of complex tasks requiring sophisticated algorithms and visualising high dimensional data. The successful integration and deployment of the enabling software to clinical (research) partners, for rigorous evaluation and testing, is a crucial step to facilitate adoption of research innovations within medical settings. In this paper, we introduce the Simple Medical Imaging Library Interface (SMILI), an object oriented open-source framework with a compact suite of objects geared for rapid biomedical imaging (cross-platform) application development and deployment. SMILI supports the development of both command-line (shell and Python scripting) and graphical applications utilising the same set of processing algorithms. It provides a substantial subset of features when compared to more complex packages, yet it is small enough to ship with clinical applications with limited overhead and has a license suitable for commercial use. After describing where SMILI fits within the existing biomedical imaging software ecosystem, by comparing it to other state-of-the-art offerings, we demonstrate its capabilities in creating a clinical application for manual measurement of cam-type lesions of the femoral head-neck region for the investigation of femoro-acetabular impingement (FAI) from three dimensional (3D) magnetic resonance (MR) images of the hip. This application for the investigation of FAI proved to be convenient for radiological analyses and resulted in high intra (ICC=0.97) and inter-observer (ICC=0.95) reliabilities for measurement of α-angles of the femoral head-neck region. We believe that SMILI is particularly well suited for prototyping biomedical imaging applications requiring user interaction and/or visualisation of 3D mesh, scalar, vector or tensor data.

BALL - biochemical algorithms library 1.3

BackgroundThe Biochemical Algorithms Library (BALL) is a comprehensive rapid application development framework for structural bioinformatics. It provides an extensive C++ class library of data structures and algorithms for molecular modeling and structural bioinformatics. Using BALL as a programming toolbox does not only allow to greatly reduce application development times but also helps in ensuring stability and correctness by avoiding the error-prone reimplementation of complex algorithms and replacing them with calls into the library that has been well-tested by a large number of developers. In the ten years since its original publication, BALL has seen a substantial increase in functionality and numerous other improvements.ResultsHere, we discuss BALL's current functionality and highlight the key additions and improvements: support for additional file formats, molecular edit-functionality, new molecular mechanics force fields, novel energy minimization techniques, docking algorithms, and support for cheminformatics.ConclusionsBALL is available for all major operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. It is available free of charge under the Lesser GNU Public License (LPGL). Parts of the code are distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL). BALL is available as source code and binary packages from the project web site at http://www.ball-project.org. Recently, it has been accepted into the debian project; integration into further distributions is currently pursued.

AIBench: A rapid application development framework for translational research in biomedicine

Applied research in both biomedical discovery and translational medicine today often requires the rapid development of fully featured applications containing both advanced and specific functionalities, for real use in practice. In this context, new tools are demanded that allow for efficient generation, deployment and reutilization of such biomedical applications as well as their associated functionalities. In this context this paper presents AIBench, an open-source Java desktop application framework for scientific software development with the goal of providing support to both fundamental and applied research in the domain of translational biomedicine. AIBench incorporates a powerful plug-in engine, a flexible scripting platform and takes advantage of Java annotations, reflection and various design principles in order to make it easy to use, lightweight and non-intrusive. By following a basic input–processing–output life cycle, it is possible to fully develop multiplatform applications using only three types of concepts: operations, data-types and views. The framework automatically provides functionalities that are present in a typical scientific application including user parameter definition, logging facilities, multi-threading execution, experiment repeatability and user interface workflow management, among others. The proposed framework architecture defines a reusable component model which also allows assembling new applications by the reuse of libraries from past projects or third-party software.

OpenMS – An open-source software framework for mass spectrometry

BackgroundMass spectrometry is an essential analytical technique for high-throughput analysis in proteomics and metabolomics. The development of new separation techniques, precise mass analyzers and experimental protocols is a very active field of research. This leads to more complex experimental setups yielding ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, analysis of the data is currently often the bottleneck for experimental studies. Although software tools for many data analysis tasks are available today, they are often hard to combine with each other or not flexible enough to allow for rapid prototyping of a new analysis workflow.ResultsWe present OpenMS, a software framework for rapid application development in mass spectrometry. OpenMS has been designed to be portable, easy-to-use and robust while offering a rich functionality ranging from basic data structures to sophisticated algorithms for data analysis. This has already been demonstrated in several studies.ConclusionOpenMS is available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) from the project website at .

Flexible systems for changing organizations: implementing RAD

Rapid application development (RAD) promises to deliver high quality applications quickly. But the approach relies on close partnerships between IT staff and business users which may not be easy to achieve in the current climate of rapidly fragmenting organizations and, like all major innovations, RAD implementation must be managed carefully over an extended time period in order to become fully instutionalised. In this paper RAD implementation at two large UK organizations is described. One has failed to institutionalise RAD, the other has succeeded. The key lessons from this work are that even basic RAD tools and techniques can deliver benefits; that RAD implementors need to be given time to learn through experience of use; that a permanent methods group can help to stimulate RAD learning and act as a linking mechanism between successive information system (IS) development projects; that a RAD framework should be prescriptive and that an education programme which explains both the role of the information technology (IT) specialist and the business user should be pursued vigorously.

Flexible systems for changing organizations: implementing RAD

Rapid application development (RAD) promises to deliver high quality applications quickly. But the approach relies on close partnerships between IT staff and business users which may not be easy to achieve in the current climate of rapidly fragmenting organizations and, like all major innovations, RAD implementation must be managed carefully over an extended time period in order to become fully instutionalised. In this paper RAD implementation at two large UK organizations is described. One has failed to institutionalise RAD, the other has succeeded. The key lessons from this work are that even basic RAD tools and techniques can deliver benefits; that RAD implementors need to be given time to learn through experience of use; that a permanent methods group can help to stimulate RAD learning and act as a linking mechanism between successive information system (IS) development projects; that a RAD framework should be prescriptive and that an education programme which explains both the role of the information technology (IT) specialist and the business user should be pursued vigorously.