[Gnumed-devel] GNUmed web client - demo available

[Sebastian Hilbert]

For those of you who did not follow the discussion on the technical aspects of a web interface for GNUmed here is a short summary. I have looked at many web interfaces and learned quite a bit about existing web frameworks. It turned out that none of the existing frameworks fit our needs. This is due to the fact that the web is designed to fire and forget while GNUmed wants a persisten connection to the database. Second aspect was that we wanted database access done by Postgresql itself rather then duplicating that inside a database (which seems to be industry standard).

Long story short. Luke Leighton from pyjamas came to help us and invested a substantial amount of time to get things rolling. A first working version was recently referenced in this article. All of the code that makes it work has recently been merged into the main GNUmed code repository.

If makes use of pyjamas, cjson and multitaskhttpd.

Here is how you can try it out and start improving it. This guide assumes you have GNUmed running already.

1.) Get and install lovely-jsonrpc

* wget http://lkcl.net/lovely-jsonrpc.tgz
* unpack it
* cd lovely-jsonrpc
* python setup.py install

2.) get and install cjson

* e.g. python-cjson on Debian

3.) get multitaskhttpd

* git clone git://pyjs.org/git/multitaskhttpd.git
* cd multitaskhttpd
* python proxyapp.py &

4.) get pyjamas

* git clone git://pyjamas.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pyjamas/pyjamas
* cd pyjamas
* python bootstrap.py
* cd bin
* put pyjsbuild into the PATH or symlink into ProxiedWeb directory of GNUmed

5.) get GNUmed from git master as tgz or a git clone. Go to gitorious for instructions.

6.) compile the pyjamas application in the GNUmed source tree

* cd ProxiedWeb
* run build.sh (make sure pyjsbuild can be be found on your system)

7.) start GNUmed like this: ./gm-from-vcs.sh --ui=web

8.) open a webbrowser and go to http://localhost:8080/ProxiedWeb/jsonrpc/output/JSONRPCExample.html

If you want to hack on it have a look at JSONRPCExample.py. It is a pyjamas application. This should be moved to the wiki in the developer section for reference.
Enjoy.