Re: [Gnumed-devel] Gui-Designers was the id_name debate

[sjtan]

> Installation of OSCAR has so far been a small part. The (lack of) open 
> project management has become a terrible concern. I do not yet have it 
> working to the point of doing anything useful, and everything to this 
> point has been a gamble, but I have been taking a chance on it, and 
> certainly want to pitch in whatever support I can to get gnumed 
> implemented


Is it Oscar(McMaster, not Oscar cluster software) or gnumed ?
If its oscar,  please enumerate your concerns with it. Maybe post a 
compare and contrast essay about advantages and disadvantages
of oscar  compared to gnumed.
Last time I looked at oscar it could do these things ( as far as I 
remember):
- write scripts ( with the help of some third party dataset)
- do appointments ( it shows here the developers understood this domain 
best )
- take clinical entries ( too many popup browser windows )
- upload files ( documents and images)

oscar setup was ok,  it's an exercise in getting any tomcat web 
application to work. It's about reading log files and aiming to
type the right configuration parameters ( e.g. no space after the 
passwords in configuration files, etc..   ), matching permissions  ,
and not about debugging program logic .

The INSTALL  readme file is really a great tutorial on running tomcat  , 
which is a web "container" or provides certain services
to application written  to a certain framework/directory structure, in 
this case Struts. The way to look at it is like a series of pointers,
web-inf/web.xml is a file that points  to  the  pieces  needed for 
Tomcat to find and configure a web serving program (ActionServlet) that 
meets a particular java interface.
Struts is extra rules of organisation, and some useful taglibs, which 
are like macros to avoid embedding java code into web pages (encouraging 
hardcoding business logic into presentation stuff ). However , all this 
indirection makes Struts look hard to learn (i.e. it's basically boring 
gruel, served with cinammon).


 A few months ago, I did some work getting gnumed schema to work with 
struts, and got demographics update and search working as a web app, and 
was working on clinical when  I got interrupted by Richard's renewed 
interest in the python client.

If any one wants to hack at struts and gnumed schema, I can put it in 
test-area.