[ICS 499] It's Only the Beginning

This semester was surely an exciting roller coaster ride full of many bent turns, unexpected loops, and some worthwhile air time. The goal of this project was to gain minimal insight into electronic health record systems (EHR), and to explore the possibilities of developing an open source component to enable greater extensibility and interoperability for development platforms. It turned out that a big competitor in the medical health record industry, Medsphere had developed just that tool for creating a Java-based linker solution, called OVID (OpenVistA Interface Domain). The OVID project is still very young, yet they've pushed through great lengths recently to have it on a fully open repository. Medsphere also released a front-end patient record dashboard along with OVID, which was built using OpenLaszlo, called lzVistA. After realizing the potential of building such a dynamic front-end GUI using such expressive component based and XML driven-development of RIA's, I started looking for alternative RIA's that could help shape my own patient dashboard. This began the exploration of finding the right RIA that I'm most comfortable with. After giving OpenLaszlo a try, I thought to myself, "Yes, I'm impressed." Then I realized the hassle of not having a dedicated IDE for editing and building OpenLaszlo applications. This led me back to the road, where I would eventually reunite with my all time favorite Flash platform. It's been a long time since the Macromedia days, and Adobe's done a great job in marketing the trend of Flash now being used on practically every browser. Adobe is also well caught up with the open source community, since they recently released a full open source version of their XML/MXML development language kit, called Flex. Flex serves as an innovative way of producing web-based applications in a much more rich and multi-platform environment. In my recent discoveries, I mentioned that Flex provides many different ways to capture and retrieve data via data services, such as web services, HTTP and remote objects (including server-based Java objects). Flex is also accompanied by an IDE built on Eclipse, called Flex Builder. This makes for an easy migration, since I'm able to switch between developing environments with ease.
It's interesting as to how large the scope of the project has become since the introduction of OVID. I'm now hoping to build a web-based EHR client using Flex and Java's back-end server connection to OpenVistA via OVID. I'm glad to say that this has been a progressive project, including the immense time spent on getting used to Flex's component-based development, and refreshing my skills in the new ActionScript v3.0. The experience was well worth it, but I've yet to close this road permanently. I'm simply putting this project on hold in promises that I'll be able to continue down this path with more added time and consistency. I'm still actively supportive in the project and I've taken the necessary steps in order to keep up-to-date. Since OVID isn't a perfected system yet, I hope to give my helping hands on their development team. This would mean that MUMPS is back to haunt me again, but at least I'll have Java to accompany me along the way. As far as this semester goes, I'm probably more satisfied with what I've learned rather than what I've produced. Along with understanding how to self-manage myself, I've also learned to become more engaging as a programmer. This has opened me up to the possibilities of how many things still need to be invented, or needs improvement in this world. I'm thrilled to know that I'm stuck somewhere in between having thought of something with the right resources to do it, and realizing the proximity of a real-life product.