Technical Details
Epic has two components.
A client which provides the user interface and interacts with external programs, and a server that controls and protects all data and enforces procedural control.
Both can run together on a single machine(e.g. a laptop) or, more normally, a single server runs on a central machine with multiple client machines talking to it. The server handles concurrency and contention issues for multiple clients.
Both the client and the server are Java based, requiring the Java 5 runtime engine (which can be downloaded here - the 'Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 Update 11' option).
The server does not have a graphical interface so can run on any operating system that supports Java - pretty much all of them.
The client requires an operating system that support a graphical user interface (GUI). The client is based on the Eclipse platform which supports all common GUI operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux. A full list can be found here under 'Target Operating Systems'.
Client hardware requirements are little more than the supporting operating system. The minimum is:
- 512 MB RAM
- 'modern' CPU from 1Ghz+
- 45 MB disk space (note that the demo version requires 120MB as it includes a Java 5 runtime engine)
Of course the bigger the better - especially the screen for which we recommend 1280x1024.
The server component is designed to be extremely lightweight. The server requires a database and a file storage area. Any server that can support the database will run the server component of Epic with little additional overhead except for configurable, additional, cache memory.
The required database can be any supported by the Hibernate database access layer, which means all major commercial and open-source options - a list can be found here. Currently tested databases are HypersonicSQL (for portable installations of Epic), PostgreSQL, Oracle 10g, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Epic requires a standard IP network for communications between client and server components, and the server and the database (which need not be on the same machine).
Open Source
Epic is built using multiple open source projects.
| concurrency | ensuring everyone sees the latest data even if others are updating it |
| contention | handling simultaneous updates by different people to the same data |
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