Fall is Coding Season

After not having tested anything personally at an IHE Connectathon in a couple of years, I'm now back to some hard core coding this fall in order to deliver on about three different projects from the same code base:

My goal is to use the same code base to:

1. Test the IHE Mobile Health Documents Profile at the IHE Connectathon in Late January
2. Create an ABBI Prototype for the ONC S&I Framework
3. Test a FHIR Profile for Document Access at the HL7 Connectathon in Early January

The specifications all vary to some extent at this point, but are being converged.  This particular experiment will help me identify the common core, and essential variants for each of these different initiatives.

Given that it's been a while, it's time to refresh my development environment.  I've been using Java 1.6, Eclipse 3.2, Tomcat 5.0 and Axis 2.1.3.  

I won't have to change my Java Runtime or Development Environment, as that is easy to keep up to date.

I do need to upgrade at least to Eclipse Helios (3.6.2),  because that is what my preferred IHE Profile library needs.  I'll be installing Open Health Tools IHE Profiles 2.0 and MDHT 1.1.  Apache Tomcat is now at release 7.0, but I don't yet know what version I'll be using, or which works best with my development environment.  If I can, I'll stick with Tomcat 5.0 because the few things I have to change, the better off life is.  If it works in Tomcat 5, it'll work with later releases.

I have no clue if I'll even need to worry about new releases of Xerces and Xalan.  I expect I won't have to, since those have been correctly configured in my development environments without any outside action be me for the past several years.  It used to be I had to mess around to get the right editions that could do what I need to.  These have stabilized to the point that I rarely have needed to mess with them, and only when I was dealing with optimization (e.g., pre-compiling stylesheets).

Downloading and installing Eclipse was easy.  I love apps that say "extract" the zip, run the app, done.  Configuring my workspace to support MDHT was hard, probably because I should have done something simple like copy files rather than import the existing MDHT Workspace folders.  I never could figure out what the problem was with .JetEmitters, so I blew away the new workspace, and used the MDHT supplied one.  I don't quite like where it lives, but I can live with that.

One challenge I had with MDHT was that my default JRE is 1.6, but MDHT likes 1.5 (which I also have, I keep a few editions laying around).  So I had to configure Eclipse to know where to find that.  Then after refreshing the projects, everything was OK as far as I could tell.

I've downloaded the OHT IHE Libraries, and my next step is to figure out how to connect to the NIST Test Registry.  Once I've figured that out, I'll write a short (I hope) post on how to accomplish that.