Re: [dhis2] Slashdot on health information systems

[Mark S. <ms...@nn...>]

I'd just finished reading through this discussion and thought I would 
post the link to this list when this message from Knut came through.
There is some good content in this discussion thread (along with the 
usual noise of Slashdot).  I found this comment particularly interesting:
---- from Slashdot----
 > if your application needs to be platform
 > independent, J2EE is the obvious choice. If you
 > want the easiest and most productive development
 > environment, stick with .NET.

I'd agree with that, with the caveat that I don't have quite the same 
level of expertise with J2EE that I do with .NET.

On the other hand, surely you're considering making some/most/all of 
your apps browser-based. If so, why not go with the following approach:
- build back-end with J2EE or .NET (your preference; generally most 
places won't care which you use for back end systems, as they'll have 
experience supporting each these days)
- expose all your functionality via Web services
- build your UI stuff in XUL so it can be driven by any Mozilla-based 
browser

Why use XUL? The following reasons:
- Mozilla browsers run on just about any platform, so your client-side 
portability issues disappear
- no client deployment. Particularly important if you face having to 
make customer-specific changes to your UI
- powerful user interface; most of the useful UI widgets are in XUL, so 
you can build an interface that users will like
- Firefox is taking a sizeable chunk out of IE's market on Windows, and 
is now getting recommendations from the sources that IT decision makers 
tend to respect
- it's easy to code test cases that require user interaction in XUL, so 
a lot of your initial testing can be done while you build up XUL expertise
- there's no real lock in; if your customer absolutely requires that a 
Mozilla browser can't be installed, the effort involved in putting 
together an identical user interface that works client-server (using 
e.g. VB.NET or Delphi) is very low once you've got a solid working GUI 
up and going in XUL. To be honest, that goes for just about any 
application; migrating your GUI from one toolset to another is very 
fast, *except* when you have to migrate to a regular HTML GUI such as IE

Downsides of XUL
- no really good IDE at present. There's a few good looking works in 
progress, but that's about it. An IDE along the lines of VS.NET or 
Delphi for XUL would be a huge step forward at this point
- documentation exists and is quite comprehensive, but high quality 
tutorial-level stuff in particular can be tough to find. Plenty of good 
reference material though; either online or in books
---------end of Slashdot comment ---------

/Mark



Knut Staring wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> There's a fairly extensive discussion on technologies for health care
> systems on Slashdot today (mainly on .Net vs. Java). 
> 
> Being an open discussion forum for geeks, there's quite a  lot of
> noise, and it seems somewhat US-centric.
> 
> Still, I found several of the subdiscussions to be of interest.
> You can find a somewhat noise-filtered version here:
> http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133829&threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change
> 
> The whole discussion can be found here: 
> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/2144208&tid=156
> 
> God Jul (Merry Yuletide) to all!
> 
> Knut
> 
> 
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-- 
Mark H. Spohr, MD
ms...@nn...
+1-530-583-3097