Re: [Gnumed-devel] gnumed architecture

[Horst Herb]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:09, Roberto Mello wrote:
> I guess my question is "why do we need a distributed objects system?"

gnumed is an international effort, should suit as many places as possible. 
When I presented gnumed on conferences in the US, France, UK, and Australia 
we learned that some countries provide information services like demographics 
or pharmaceutical reference - would be silly to duplicate the existing 
services.

Thus, we broke gnumed into self-sufficient entities ("services"), which in the 
best case act as a simple API to an externally available service, or 
otherwise provide the API to access gnumed's own backend(s).

Since gnumed is aiming at conquering large hospital system just the same as 
small private practices, it needs to be scalable. Physical distribution is 
one way of achieving this scalability. 

Another issue is backing up: If everything is in a monolithic database, you 
need to backup the lot - which could cost huge unneccessary costs if you 
think of data like drug reference etc. which is usually provided from 
external source and can typically be reconstructed without needing a backup.

Last, nut not least we want other free projects benefit from gnumeds 
achievements - it is a lot easier to integrate compact self-sufficient 
distributed services into your own software than a monolithic mammoth.

Horst