Psych Desktop

Psych Desktop is an open source (GPL) web operating system (although on its website it is referred to as a web desktop). It was started October 2006, then later moved into a subversion repository in April 2007. It is built on top of the Dojo Toolkit. There is no official release available, however it is obtainable through its subversion repository. Some of the features include a CSS-based theme engine, the ability to write custom applications, a server-side filesystem, and a powerful UNIX-like console.The desktop is scheduled for it's first release on the 19th March 2008.

Structure
Psych Desktop is written in mostly javascript. As a result of being built on top of the Dojo Toolkit, many of the ideas behind Dojo are also used in Psych Desktop, such as code reuse and extending objects. During startup, the desktop loads modules that provide its core functionality. Modules are split into two categories: core functionality, and application apis. Apis are used by applications to do things like draw windows and interact with the filesystem, while core modules provide the desktop with things like the taskbar and application execution.

The server side code is written to act mostly as a storage system. The server code is written in both PHP and Python. The two languages can be used interchangeably. The reason for this is so that applications in the future will be able to use python's numerous amount of modules to make a variety of applications for server administration. It is organized into a variation of the Model-view-controller architecture. There are models that are used to interface with a database system such as MySQL, SQLite, Oracle or even Microsoft SQL Server. There is also an output framework, that will convert output into formats such as JSON and XML. Then there are backends, which the client makes AJAX calls to. The backends use the output framework and the models to modify and output the data stored in the database.

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See Also

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