It appears that every once in a while, makers of really good software remember that there are projects out there who could have used their software, if only they had the resources. Instantiations has very kindly donated a licence for their WindowBuilder Pro product for Opereffa, and I am more than happy to have access to their excellent tool. For those who have not heard about them Instantiations is a company which produces great tools for software developers. Especially if you are using Eclipse, and you are developing desktop or GWT based web applications, their WindowBuilder Pro is pretty much the best tool that money can buy. WindowBuilder Pro does only let you create SWT and Swing forms, but it also lets you create SWT gui artefacts which are crucial in Eclipse plugins. Developing views and editors using WindowBuilder Pro is much easier compared to hand coding them, and guess what: we have lots of tooling to do around Opereffa’s Eclipse plugins.

Simply by filling in a form you can ask for a licence donation for your open source project, and if you are granted one like us, then you can enjoy really good tooling. Since WindowBuilder Pro does not generate any unusual artefacts, you can easily distribute your source code without any dependencies to propriatry resources or libraries. What more can you ask for?

I’ve had my eyes on the mobile market for years. I’ve started with j2me apps on a motorola phone, and I’ve developed c# based applications for both that phone and ipaq. In general I loved it. I thought the devices and their future held enourmout potential, and today’s mobile application market is getting close to what I had in mind, especially with IPhone.

The trouble is; developing mobile applications is expensive. Yes, you heard me. Capable devices which also has a market are expensive to buy, since you usually need a developer edition of the device. For Iphone, things are even harder, since you have to have a Mac to develop for it. Combine Mac mini (cheapest you can buy and use for the purpose) and a developer iPhone, and you’re looking at something above 1000$ already. For the slightly interested developer this a really high entry cost. Then there is the issue of distribution, where you have to go through a bunch of processes and get approval from someone (Appple, Google etc) to distribute your application.

If we had a platform like the common PC, for which you can simply develop with some open source tools (or free as in beer ones) the mobile market would be in a much better position. The cheapest combination at the moment seems to be to get an Android phone, somehow crack it (I wonder if that’s legal anyway), and develop for it. Still, I’m not sure if Android’s app store would simply let you publish your application if it was developed on a reguler phone, rather than a registered developer device.

Introducing such a barrier to mobile development may be working for the big names for the moment, but I am certainly not happy about it.

The competition amont different information models in healthcare will never end. Yes, I know that there are many out there who think that a particular piece of work is so much better than the rest, and it is the feature of healthcare informatics. Sorry, I don’t agree. There are many other reasons, which I’d like to outline in another post, but in general, I can’t see this competition going away in the future.

What is interesting is, use of terminologies is common in many information model standards, whether it be HL7, EN 13606 or openEHR. There are many open source tools for many aspects of healthcare informatics, but when it comes to terminology management, the choices are surprisingly few! Other than NCI’s LexGrid initiative and Apelon, I can’t see any serious terminology server work in the open source domain. These two have their own pros and cons, but in general, this sub domain is surprisingly deserted. Please know that I’m not considering projects which were updated 3 years ago for the last time as candidates for my work in Opereffa.

There is huge work around the concepts which will eventually get linked to terminologies, but there is not much effort in the terminology server area. Yes there are many browsers out there, but whatever you do in the modelling phase, you’ll have to have access to a proper terminology server during use of that model (be it a Snomed CT subset or an HL7 message with Snomed CT codes in it). So why I can’t see an interest in this? Is it because people are so focused at well known problems, that they do not bother to think about what lies beyond them? Did open source healthcare attack the problem of informatin model based solutions first, omitting terminology based solutions? Terminology based approaches are old, and they are well established, so I can’t explain the lack of open source decent projects in this field. If you know one, drop me a line, and I’ll buy you a beer/wine/{insert your favorite drink here}.