HL7 Toolkit / News: Recent posts

A new version, 0.75, of the API has been released. It simply fixes Message creation to allow compatibility with all message types including those defined locally.

Please upgrade to API version 0.74. This version contains an important fix on Message class to prevent execution of arbitrary code.

Finally, those long standing issues have been fixed in a new version of the HL7 API. Thanks to Brent B. Powers for patches and Ed Murphy for waking me up...

Last week the HL7 toolkit (the hl7d package and the HL7 API that is) were tested on a windows 2003 server, and to my surprise the stuff worked out of the box. The one thing that doesn't work on windows is detaching from the console. A more detailed document, including making hl7d a windows service, will follow shortly.

Please help in the discussion on this. See the Forums (Forae).

All you Perl HL7 lovers, please upgrade to hl7d version 0.31 in combination with Net-HL7 0.71. The Net-HL7 0.70 release is broken!!!
I'll make sure the Net-HL7 0.7x compliant version of the hl7qd will follow shortly.

The API has been rewritten into more efficient code. Also, creating a new message now creates an EMPTY message. Before, an MSH segment was automatically created. This effects the use of the hl7qd and hl7d packages!!! I'll be releasing new versions of those soon, so you can use the new API in combination with hl7d and hl7qd.

The newest component in the toolkit is the hl7qd, a daemon that can manage non HL7 queue's like databases, filesystems, etc. The dameon can manage polling processes that read those queues, translate into HL7, and translate the HL7 response back into some other queue.

The hl7d has been found to contain some major flaws during severe testing. The 0.30 version fixes these problems, has some plugin examples and better documentation. Please upgrade to this version if you are using the hl7d.

API (pod) documentation is now automatically generated every night from the latest CVS sources. How's that for up-to-date docs?

This project aims at providing a Perl Toolkit for using the HL7 protocol (a data interchange protocol used in healthcare). The toolkit will consist of a number of Perl libraries and scripts for developing HL7 capable applications in Perl. An early version of the hl7 server has been added to the project. This is a forking server that uses the Net::HL7 module, and dispatches incoming HL7 messages to user defined plugins.

When submitting the toolkit's API module to CPAN, I decided to change the namsepace to Net::HL7. The next download therefore will be Net-HL7-<version>.tar.gz.
I'll also do some redesign, like removing the HL7 core module, so the version number will start afresh.

The HL7 toolkit is finally submitted to CPAN, as Net::HL7, version 0.61. Please use this version and upgrades from now on.