iLabbook Documentation

Goals for iLabbook

We are building an open source Research Platform for the future, beginning with a focus on an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN). We especially have in mind those in the academic or startup communities who may be financially constrained but have the time and interest in using and helping to build a robust ELN for their own unique research and/or teaching needs.

Our goal is to incorporate best practices that will lead to an outstanding ELN for the research community. Our main goals include the following.

  • Free and open source with a liberal license
  • Fast and easy to install
  • Cross platform (Linux, Windows, Mac)
  • Minimize the learning curve for immediate productivity
  • Maximize the speed and productivity of development
  • Easily customizable for any research project
  • Excellent documentation for installation, customization, and for the internal architecture
  • Built on widely supported technical foundations
  • Accuracy in scientific and technical computations
  • Scale from Raspberry Pi up through sophisticated cloud computing
  • Integrate with widely used research software packages as simply as possible
  • Build on a strong open source community
  • Have an efficient runtime

Our Solution

In trying to meet these goals there are always trade-offs. Assessing the possibilities, we have decided to use the Oqtane framework for iLabbook going forward**. Oqtane is a relatively young framework, but it has some fairly unique characteristics.

  • Blazor provides the following advantages.
    • The front end (i.e., the browser interface) is developed with C#, the same language used for the server side code.
    • Utilizes WASM in the browser, opening up many previously unavailable computational possibilities
    • Productive environment through simplified component building
    • Long term support from Microsoft
    • Liberal Apache license
    • Excellent free and paid development environments (Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains Rider)
    • Cross platform (Linux, Window, Mac)
  • The Oqtane framework provides the additional advantages.
    • Micro-frontend allowing multiple backend sources. This will be useful for utilizing different scientific packages on the backend with a common interface in the browser.
    • Developed by a team with experience building DNN, the most successful open source .NET content management system to date
    • Themeable
    • Supports multiple databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite)
    • Highly extensible through independent modules
    • Liberal MIT license

Documentation Contents

This documentation for iLabbook is structured as follows.

  1. Overview contains information about the overall project, concepts, building the documentation, and article and video links
  2. Administration Manuals has instructions for administrators
  3. Development has information about the structure of the Oqtane code and default custom modules and how to make your own modules
  4. Examples has various examples for how you might extend iLabbook for your own use
  5. Code Documentation is extracted from the source code and organized for easy access
  6. To work on the docs, read up on how the docs work

** Note that this direction in development is a change from our use of the Drupal CMS for an ELN for the past 14 years