A new cross-platform architecture for epi-info software suite

BACKGROUND: The Epi-Info software suite, built and maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is widely used by epidemiologists and public health researchers to collect and analyze public health data, especially in the event of outbreaks such as Ebola and Zika. As it exists today, Epi-Info Desktop runs only on the Windows platform, and the larger Epi-Info Suite of products consists of separate codebases for several different devices and use-cases. Software portability has become increasingly important over the past few years as it offers a number of obvious benefits. These include reduced development time, reduced cost, and simplified system architecture. Thus, there is a blatant need for continued research. Specifically, it is critical to fully understand any underlying negative performance issues which arise from platform-agnostic systems. Such understanding should allow for improved design, and thus result in substantial mitigation of reduced performance. In this paper, we present a viable cross-platform architecture for Epi-Info which solves many of these problems. RESULTS: We have successfully generated executables for Linux, Mac, and Windows from a single code-base, and we have shown that performance need not be completely sacrificed when building a cross-platform application. This has been accomplished by using Electron as a wrapper for an AngularJS app, a Python analytics module, and a local, browser-based NoSQL database. CONCLUSIONS: Promising results warrant future research. Specifically, the design allows for cross-platform form-design, data-collection, offline/online modes, scalable storage, automatic local-to-remote data sync, and fast analytics which rival more traditional approaches.