Shahid’s Perspectives

I just ran across this link that provides a list of existing open source Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solutions. I’ve been working off and on in this space for almost 8 years but the field just doesn’t seem to mature. None of the healthcare vertical open sources solutions seem to have the kind of quality we’ve come to expect from the horizontal applications and technology space (like Apache web server or Linux operating system).

I was looking for some code I needed for a project I’m working on today and ran across koders.com, a search engine specificially geared towards searching source code. It’s a great site and helped me find what I was looking for without going through dozens of links on Google.

Stop hunting for the right fonts for your IDE: go right to this article.

I need this every once in a while and I can never find it when I do — a list of all the variations of the os.name java system property. Take a look at this page for a pretty comprehensive list: What os or arch value can I use?

I just ran across Surrogate, a great little library that really puts AOP (aspect oriented programming, something I’ve been training clients on for some time) to excellent use. As a complement to Junit and a really great implementation of the mock objects pattern, Surrogate can help achieve ~100% code coverage by helping you mock out even Java system libraries (where tests might be time-dependent or have external dependencies in commercial libraries that you don’t have source for).

As an architect and developer I have many open source (and commercial) tools at my disposal for creating software but I’ve had a hard time finding quality open source (or even commercial) projects for managing my projects. I just started a large-scale service oriented medical informatics project and have had to cobble together solutions for the following goals: project comprehension, team communication, and artifacts management. Here’s what I’ve done so far…

• We need to create an ultra-modern and great looking marketing website. We’ve outsourced this off-shore as an experiment and have chosen Basecamp to manage the project. Basecamp has been nice but it’s designed for general project management (and Basecamp was written by a design firm) so it’s not great for software development. I took a look at Rally as well but they made it very hard to try out the product and it’s very expensive for what I think it does. The Rally guys just raised millions in venture capital so they need to make sure they charge high prices to return money to their investors. I took a look at Trac, too, and found it quite nice but they only support SubVersion while I’m still using CVS. Of course, i made the requisite stop at at Atlassian who make Jira and Confluence but those are not integrated enough for me to pay the money.
• We need an ultra-modern and highly usable graphic design in the user interface of the application itself. We’re still looking for a design firm to help us here but I don’t think there’s any specific software that’s going to help here. Once the design is done we’ll be using our own inhouse Sparx framework to write the code.
• We need to create an online demo that shows every feature of our product — one in an interactive manner and another in movie format for easier viewing. We’re managing the project in Basecamp but the actual tool we’re currently using is undecided.
• We need a continuous integration tool to make sure all the various software components we’re creating remain stable and tested throughout the project. We have chosen and installed LuntBuild 1.2 beta and are very happy with it. It’s easy to use, flexible, and quite powerful at the same time. Of course, the builds have JUnit integrated.
• We needed code coverage instrumentation to ensure that our unit testing provides enough coverage. We’re using Emma, which I referred to in a blog a few months back. We’ve integrated it into LuntBuild and it’s working like a charm — not quite as glossy as Clover but Emma is plenty powerful and it’s free.
• For defect tracking I’m sticking with Bugzilla for now.