A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

3.2.2 Web application
CakePHP framework
CakePHP 7 is an open-source web development framework written in PHP. It uses a MVC
(model-view-controller) architecture to cleanly separate data, business logic and user interface.
The framework is typically used with relational databases, however a data source implementation
exists which allows it to be used with MongoDB 8 .
User interface
Browsing Figures 3.2 and 3.3 show screenshots of the online lexicon application. The former
shows how one can browse and search by root and derivational form, which aims to replicate
the same interface as in the online database of root and pattern verbs (Camilleri & Spagnol,
2013). The latter is an example of searching through the lexeme entries, which is the primary
way in which a lexicon is usually used. Figure 3.4 shows the detail page for a single entry,
where all the wordforms for that lexeme are displayed and can be filtered.
Figure 3.2: Searching for a root by regular expression in the computation lexicon
Searching
All search terms in the application are treated as regular expressions. A regex
helper interface is provided on roots page to help users unfamiliar with regex syntax (shown
being used in figure 3.2). In order to prevent against slow database queries, the beginning
of string anchor ^ is inserted automatically before all queries. This a merely a user-interface
7 http://cakephp.org, accessed 2013-09-03
8 https://github.com/ichikaway/cakephp-mongodb/, accessed 2013-09-03
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