# COSMOS Developer's Guide

# Extending the Web User Interface Framework

This topic is the introduction to extending the Web user interface.

The COSMOS Web user interface framework is a web-based framework that facilitates the assembly of web components into a single web console application. It includes the following items:

- A set of out-of-the-box web widgets
- A registration service to discover and share web widget configurations
- A page template processor

A web widget is a lightweight, portable component that can be installed and can run within any separate HTML-based web page without requiring a separate compilation.

The focus of the COSMOS UI framework is to provide reusable web widgets to help facilitate the development and validation of Management Data Repositories (MDRs) as defined by the Configuration Management Database Specification Federation specification (CMDBf). An MDR is a CMDBf term that represents a component that contains data about managed resources (e.g. computer systems, application software and building) and process artifacts (e.g. incident records and requests for change forms) and the relationships between them.

This section first covers the overall architecture of the COSMOS UI framework, followed by a set of tutorials that help the user understand basic concepts and extension mechanisms.

What you need to know

Before reading this topic be aware that the COSMOS UI framework uses web methodologies such as AJAX and web technologies such as HTTP, JSON, XML, and Javascript. You need to be quite familiar with these technologies and methodologies. In addition, the framework heavily relies on the Dojo toolkit. You must have a good understanding of the following Dojo toolkit concepts.

- JavaScript Programming With Dojo and Dijit
- Dijit - The Dojo Widget Library.

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