EMMAWiki/TermsAndConcepts/ForDevelopers/ProgrammingLanguages
TermsAndConcepts: Programming Languages
EMMA is mainly written in object-oriented Perl. Perl is an iterpreted language which is commonly used for building web-applications. From our point of view the major strengths of perl are string processing, databse accessibility and web-applications, but it lacks structured data-types and number crunching capabilities. EMMA relies on numerous third party perl modules to complement this.
The analysis functions are implemented using the statistical environment R. R has excellent support for many statistical methods and the Bioconductor project provides loads of functionality for microarray data analysis within R.
To provide interactive functionality with a web-browser we unfortunately have to use :( JavaScript :-( . The JavaScript implementations of many browser differ and this is a real mess. JavaScript is the main couse why EMMA does not work with the AnyBrowser.