February 17th, 2008 andrew
Our initial cross platform porting efforts were directed at OSX, but given its heritage we knew that linux would be close. It was quite easy in fact in the end and was running within a few hours. The yahoo user interface toolkit has been chosen for the UI and its certainly impressive. As capricorn is mainly a client for secure messaging it doesn’t not need much of a UI, but much could be done in a browser when combined with JSON and rest methods. Pictured is a form to send simple secure clinical messages directly from Firefox. Its useful to send quick notes but usually capricorn would integrate directly with other software.
Posted in HL7, LINUX, MESSAGING, SOAP, Uncategorized | No Comments »
August 26th, 2006 andrew
At the recent Australian HIC 2006 Conference Medical-objects was involved in some way with virtually every scenario in the Interoperability demo. In fact the demo ran on the new realtime HL7 client Capricorn.
As usual many lessons were learned, more than in months of internal testing. The value of standards was again demonstrated. Integration with the Sun Microsystems Identity Service was achieved using a brand new implementation of AS2 (rfc 4130) which worked flawlessly with minimal tweaking. Getting this level of interoperability without a written standard would have taken weeks of testing. In this case it took 2 days of testing and tweaking to make it run flawlessly.
Medical-Objects also generated the display HTML for the IBM XDS (Cross document sharing) demonstration without any pre-conference testing by using a SOAP based web service. This was not even housed in the same physical location, but again was working after the 2 day setup period without any changes to the SOAP service.
While virtually all the interactions at the demo required 2 days of tweaking, they were all working in the end, something that would be impossible without standards based interfaces. While it appears to be popular to lament the flexibility and optionality in HL7 V2 this demonstration proves that with some basic interface engine functionality at the borders, interoperability is not a pipe dream, but achievable in short time frames when a little effort is expended.
Posted in EHR, HL7, SOAP, STANDARDS | No Comments »
June 8th, 2006 andrew
As part of monitoring our new realtime GP SOAP clients we are closely monitoring uptime (every 5 minutes). One practice was experiencing poor uptime and we had narrowed it down to a problem were a http connection to the Medical-Objects HL7 Proxy server was hanging and never returning. No errors occured, but the connection had to forcably be closed to allow the client to continue to function.
After narrowing the problem and coming up with the workaround to allow some function (as the http call progressed normally often) we were unable to see any obvious coding issue. Then one day everything started to work and the errors were gone!
An email revealed that the “Cheap” ADSL router had been replaced by a Cisco router. We can only attribute the previous problems to firmware bugs in old ADSL router. This is not the first time we have seen this, but the graphic provides dramatic evidence of the value of a good quality router.
Each horizontal line is one day with total uptime as percent on the left.
Posted in HL7, SOAP | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2006 andrew
SOA is the latest buzz word. Its probably inappropriate to dismiss it as the basic principles are quite sound, but its not a new idea.
Medical-Objects fully supports “Service Orientated Architecture” and in fact has had just that architecture from the start. What is annoying is the idea that SOA means XML and SOAP. By definition it does not, but if your sole source of information is marketing material you may think so.
HL7 V2 supports a SOA model quite well. It supports the concept of applications handling a subset of functionality and other applications using that functionality via HL7 Messaging. ADT and master files are good examples of this. The critics would say its not constrained enough to call it SOA, but they presume that its easy to write highly constrained wsdl that the whole world will think is fine to use unchanged, and this is a pipe dream. Its a pipe dream that the original inventors of HL7 understood and made allowances for. You may have to negotiate parameters a little but the structure will support virtually any parameter you want.
SOA is a Pattern to allow distributed applications to be designed using the same sound principles of software design that have been known (and often ignored) for years. To quote “Elements of Reusable Object-Orientated Software”, the bible of software design by the GOF: the most important principle is “Programming to an Interface, not an Implementation” SOA does not replace Object Orientated software design, as I have heard some people suggest, it simply moves it to a distributed networkable component model. It has nothing to do with XML or SOAP primarily, they are just one implementation of the pattern, HL7 V2 is another.
Posted in HL7, SOAP | No Comments »
December 16th, 2005 andrew
In the last week Medical-Objects has enabled a trial SOAP interface for communicating with Medical-Objects or 3rd party servers. While this interface is “New” it is a thin layer over an interface we have been using for several years.
the Wsdl is viewable at http://202.44.75.20:2000/SOAP/?wsdl
While we take the view that the actual messaging needs to be done in HL7, providing a SOAP interface, does enable an easy “first step” in setting up a connection. The set of interfaces provide for practice metadata and registration options as well as the actual transmission of data.
The Interface definition is open and is also implemented by our lightweight client “Capricon” that turns any broadband connection into a fully functional secure messaging portal in about 10 minutes. Capricorn is available under a beta trial program now.
Posted in HL7, SOAP | No Comments »