[HAPI-devel] Announcements: HAPI 2.2 is out! (plus playing with FHIR)

[James A. <ja...@ja...>]

Hello everyone,

** New release **

I'm happy to announce that HAPI 2.2 has been uploaded to Sourceforge and
sync'ed to the Maven global repos. This release includes new releases of
the core library, structures, and the hl7-over-http lib.

There are plenty of bugfixes and improvements in the new version. As
always, see the
changelog<http://hl7api.sourceforge.net/changes-report.html> for
a complete list. In particular, users of the HL7-over-HTTP library are
recommended to upgrade right away, as there are several critical bugs fixed
in the new version.

Thanks as always to everyone who contributed towards this release! Please
feel free to post questions (or accolades) on the list. :)

** FHIR **

On another note, we at UHN have been (ahem) playing with
FHIR<http://hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/>, and
have decided to implement the spec in HAPI. For those who are unfamiliar
with FHIR, it's a new emerging specification for data exchange coming out
of HL7 and personally I believe it has a bright future in terms of its
ability to meet many needs that have been hard to meet with v2.

We have embarked on an effort to develop FHIR compliance into HAPI. The
FHIR specification actually includes a (very nice) Java based reference
implementation, but we are coming at the problem from another angle. Where
the RI is aiming to support the whole spec in a generic way, we are looking
at replicating our v2 methodology where conformance profiles are used to
constrain and extend the base specification and then a Maven based code
generator creates custom classes which you can program against. (And
incidentally, I definitely see potential for us to contribute our
improvements back to the RI if they end up being useful. More to come on
that..)

We've actually made very good progress on this so far, but there is lots
more work to do which is why I'm mentioning this here. If anyone is
interested in getting involved, please speak up (either here or by email to
me). We have tasks big and small for the taking, and would love to hear
from you.

The public tree for our codebase is here if anyone wants to have a look:
https://sourceforge.net/p/hl7api/fhircode/ci/master/tree/

Cheers,
James