BMC Genomics 2009, 10(Suppl 3):S7 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/10/S3/S7 Figure 3 Relationship between model view and controller. the business process of an application. It receives and responds to the requests from the Controller layer and the View layer. The View layer is a visual representation of the informa- tion contained in the Model layer through listening for and reflecting the state updates in the Model layer. A view may change when the information in the Model layer changes, so there can be more than one view for a model. The Controller layer helps the communication between the Model layer and the View layer by listening to the user inputs and translating these inputs into the data changes in the Model layer. It also instructs the View layer to make changes in the user interface when the Model layer updates. The Struts-Spring-Hibernate framework We designed and developed the MP-PBmice system with the lightweight enterprise-level development framework Struts-Spring-Hibernate to implement the MVC pattern [46,47]. This development framework is widely used in commerce and would meet the demands from the large volume of experimental data. In our implementation, the Model layer is also called the Data Access Object (DAO) layer, which is formed by the database models generated by Middlegen http://boss. bekk.no/boss/middlegen/. These database models are composed of Java objects describing the models, opera- tions, and model relationships of the database. DAO performs queries on the database models to obtain the information using Hibernate Query Language supported Page 6 of 13 (page number not for citation purposes)