The eyeOS RIA framework is a great resource to have new custom apps be developed to cover your company’s specific needs and to leverage native functions of the system, such as user management, file sharing, real-time notifications, chat, walls, database management, etc.
To make app development in eyeOS as simple as possible an application system has been developed that lets developers program safe in the knowledge that another application won’t interfere with theirs.
The programming languages needed for developing in eyeOS are PHP and JavaScript. This way, when users run an application in eyeOS, a visual window will appear to interact with the application. This window is developed using a high-level JavaScript library called Qooxdoo, similar to GTX, Qt, Java Swing or similar toolkits used for developing GUIs. When the GUI programmed in JavaScript needs to perform an operation on the server, it uses communication libraries to send messages (which essentially are AJAX requests) to the PHP functions defined by the application.
This way, an application in eyeOS is an independent component that deploys the eyeOS APIs, using the RIA development environment, and can be installed or uninstalled like any other application in a Linux or Windows OS.
Each application, once run, can be seen as an eyeOS process and has its own process identifier like in any real operating system. What’s more, a set of security rules can be defined so that only one user, or a group of users, can view, install and use the application.
So in other words, it’s a bit like a traditional OS where each application is run separately, with its own process and process number, and where each application can have different execute privileges.
