[OLPC library] [Re] 'OLPC-Health' takes off !!

[drew einhorn]

On Feb 6, 2008 1:24 AM, Andreas Tille <tillea at rki.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Seth Woodworth wrote:

> > Software:
> > *We're researching what would be the best medical records software
> > for the XO. OpenMRS, OpenEHR, or VistA
>
> I never made it to dive more deeply into the former two.  I spend some
> time on VistA which might be the most advanced software in this field.
> THe problem of VistA is that it is quite huge and the requirement of
> MUMPS (I never heard of this except in connection with VistA and nobody
> else seems to know it) makes it kind of hard to tackle because we are
> lacking some basic knowledge that will probably be required.
>
> On the other hand VistA consist of several more or less independant
> modules (if I'm not missleaded) and we could try to start with some
> parts that might be on one hand more interesting for smaller laptop
> clients and are perhaps easier to package.
>

The VistA backend is written in Mumps.  Fortunately it works on the XO
with only a couple hours of tweaking.  All that would need is a little
polishing
of installation scripts.  Do not have an XS to try it on but I would be amazed
if it gave us any more trouble.

If the backend required major modifications, I do not think you would
want to do it, but fortunately it's not required.

The most important frontends are written in Borland Delphi.  There are
serveral approaches to getting the front ends running on the XO:

  (1) try getting them running under Wine.  My guess is that the XO does
  not have the necessary resources to run the frontends on top of an
  emulated windows environment, but I could be wrong.

  (2) use a Coco/R based translation from Delphi to Lazarus/Free Pascal.
  The major problem here is that some of the objects from Borland's VCL
  Visual Component Library are missing in the Lazarus LCL.

  (3) Instead translate to Python.  We would still need to use LCL and fill
  in the missing pieces.

  (4) Instead translate to AJAX on the server side and user a regular web
  browser on the XO.

I think that (2) is the most likely approach to bear fruit.

There is more detail on these approaches with links at
wiki.laptop.com/go/WorldVistA

-- 
Drew Einhorn