Because Sahana Eden needs to be accessible to users at remote locations, including the public, a browser-based solution was essential. The system also needs to be able to be used on offline laptops, so it needs to run on a lightweight stack.
Python was selected as a suitable high level language allowing the rapid customization of code required for each individual circumstance yet has a large number of powerful libraries available including for Geospatial Information Systems (GIS).
Sahana Eden includes tools for synchronization between multiple instances, allowing for responders or district offices to capture data on victims in the field and exchange the data with other offices, headquarters or responders in the field.
The Sahana Eden Software Platform has been built around a Rapid Application Development (RAD) Framework. This provides a high level of automation to ensure that new solutions can be quickly and effectively developed. Once a database table is defined, the Sahana Eden Framework automatically generates HTML pages to handle CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) as well as Search, Map and Pivot Reports. Web Services are available to import and export in XML, CSV, JSON and EXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transforms are supported to produce other data standards.
The Sahana Eden Framework has flexible authorization policies which can be configured to grant permissions for different modules, tables as well as the ability to have multiple Organizations control their own data on a single Sahana Eden installation.
Sahana Eden can be downloaded and run locally from a flash drive. Synchronization functionality allows data to be entered then keep up to date between different installations, including online servers and local flash drive installations. The Sahana Eden Framework also includes a scheduler for running tasks at a specific time, in regular intervals or as asynchronous tasks which are triggered by users.
The basic Sahana Eden architecture is as follows:
| Web Server | Apache | Other web servers can also be used, such as Cherokee. |
| Application | Sahana Eden | |
| Web Application Framework | Web2Py | |
| Programming Language | Python & Java Script | |
| Database | MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite | MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite are supported. Other databases should be usable without major additional work since Web2Py supplies many connectors. |
| Operating System | Linux (Debian recommended) | Windows and Mac OS X are possible, but only recommended for single-user environments. |
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