[Gnumed-devel] on the list again

[Horst Herb]

Curse my ISP - apparently the IP numbers including my own accou8nt had 
been blocked for spamming.

Just noticed that none of my postings from teh past weeks got through to 
the list.

A few issues:

1.) OSCAR: David and I agreed in Los Angeles in November to cooperate. 
We will both try to facilitate at least comprehensive import/export 
functionality, but I am rather aiming at breaking gnumed up further to 
produce the long awaited independent modules: demographic information, 
progress notes, pharmaceutical reference, recalls, appointments - all 
provided via independent "service modules" communicating with each 
other. So that an OSCAR billing module can talk to a gnumed 
"appointments" module and both together to an LDAP based demographic 
module maybe.

I agree that a web interface is not everybodies pie, but it has it's 
uses and - let's not forget - it has been in daily use for a while now 
and those using it seem to like it. I would like to cooperate more with 
them. David has also an interest in drugref.org, which for me has become 
number one priority (Ian did most of the programming work so far, but I 
think I have now achieved quite a lot politically by lobbying and we 
will be able to tap into a number of ressources soon)

2.) XML-RPC: I waded through stacks of documentation from a few dozen 
(!) different projects/approaches trying to solve the authentication 
issue. I came to the seemingly farfetched conclusion that "jabber" would 
solve many of our problems in a very elegant and non-intrusive 
"lightweight" way. "Jabber" is a versatile communication protocol able 
to carry any number of payloads - including XML-RPC - while taking care 
of authentication in a very comprehensive way. Just finished reading 
"Programming Jabber" from O'Reilly's - a commendable book, very hands 
on. Now I'll have to finish the demographic module with a 
proof-of-concept implementation

3.) Demographic module: (Ian probably will cheer now) I give in and 
acknowledge that the separation of geographic information from identity 
related information was unwise, creates more problems than it helps. I 
would vote for re-uniting them into one common "demographic" module. 
Somebody should start working on an LDAP compatible front end for our 
demographic database.

4.) If time allows, I will create a new directory gnumed/RFC/API and 
submit my module stubs for the demographic API tonight or tomorrow

Horst