WPI GDC Club Management System — Technology

The Club Management System is built on the backs of several existing Open Source technologies, as well as the respected Sun Java system.  The various technologies which this program uses are listed below.

• Java - while Sun's Java is not (exactly) Open Source (although there are Open Source runtimes), it is a highly stable, easy to use, cross-platform language.  It is successfully used on platforms ranging from Sparc stations, to x86 systems, to Alpha systems.  Most of the core technologies used by the Club Management System are written using Java.
• XML - the pages are described in XML using a skeleton language.  This is then processed via the CMS system which in creates a final XML document, describing the system with all data in place.
• XSLT - plain XML is fairly useless for web content, but XSLT transforms the data into something useful for a webbrowser.  XSLT is the final stage of the process, transforming XML into another XML format useful for web content - in most cases, this will be HTML.
• Cocoon 2 - Cocoon 2 aims to be an enterprise-class XML based web solution.  Cocoon 2 is used to process the XML documents and as the XSLT engine to create the final HTML documents.
• Jakarta Tomcat - a requirement for Cocoon 2, it's a servlet engine.  Most likely servlets will not be used extensively except for data submission tasks.  (Or everything, if you count the Cocoon servlet.)