Architecture OverviewΒΆ
If you need a brief introduction to the technical architecture of Indicia, then read on.
A website built using Indicia consists of 2 main components:
The warehouse
The client website
The warehouse consists of the database itself and administration tools as well as a set of web-services which allow the client website to communicate with it. The client website is the part which hosts the online recording, reporting and other pages which the end-user sees. Indicia uses a distributed architecture, meaning that the client website and the warehouse can be on separate machines connected only via the internet. The division into two components serves to keep the administration interfaces and the end-user interfaces completely separate. Also, a fully featured online recording solution makes heavy demands on the server technology, in particular to allow it to properly support spatial data. Therefore this separation allows a single warehouse to be shared between multiple client websites. As long as a partner able to host a warehouse can be found, the server technology required to run online recording on a client website is minimal. In fact, most cheap web hosting services will support Indicia-based online recording client websites.
Whether developing for warehouse or client website, an understanding of the data model used by the warehouse and the API provided for communicating between the two will be important.
