[dhis2] The design of dhis2

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I have been reading in the recently published book {J2EE Development
without EJB}. It promotes the strategy we are planning to use, namely
using a lightweight framework for our business layer. This will reduce
complexity compared to using EJB. This strategy work best for
web application, and I would thing for our application as well. But I
think we must keep in mind that we are not firstly developing a web
application, but that web enabling comes as an added value.

The case of doing data entry is not well supported by a web
interface, and this comes to many managing and adapting cases as
well. Common tasks is to add new data elements, fill inn lookup
tables, making a new organisational structure. This should be
supported by a more extensive UI than the web.

If a regional office have an intra net we need to have the business
layer remotely available. An other option is to have a shared
database, and have the business layer locally on each computer. But
there might be cases where there will be a need to have a shared
business layer. In that case we need a remote interface to our
business layer. The book I mentioned states that EJB is the best
solution for remote interfacing if you are using RMI or IIOP. But
since we don't want to struggle with the complexity of EJB, and don't
want to use a commercial application server, this is not a good
option. There are however other alternatives like SOPE. SOPE is a xml
based remoteing protocol closely associated with the web. There might
be other alternatives as well, this needs to be looked closer into.

We need to think about how the reporting from district and upward
could be accommodated by our application in the light of the varying
infrastructure in the third world. There must be multiple options
among others,paper based reporting, sending a diskette, sending
e-mails, automatic sending of all data made in a period of time (done
at night when the telephone system is in little use), input of
individual entries in a regional/national database etc.

An other question is how the district can get access to
regional/national data and to data from other districts. This can be
done by making the regional/national report UI available on the
WWW. To make the report UI of individual district available on the WWW
is possible, but for most district this is not an option.