(Sent on behalf of serefarikan@kurumsalteknoloji.com, please do not
reply to this address)
Dear members of the openEHR community,
We would like to announce the first release of a new Eclipse plugin for
the Opereffa framework. This contains all the current tooling provided
by Opereffa and is expected to become the focus of all our tooling work
in the Eclipse environment.
The plugin utilises the current codebase of Opereffa and can be used to
work on any archetypes which stay within the current scope of its
implementation. The test archetypes released with Opereffa can be used
to explore use of the plugin.
Our planned scope in this tooling initiative is wide-ranging. It
includes terminology integration, reporting, GUI artefact and source
code generation, persistence, context-sensitive help, tutorials and
more. We are working to connect the framework to a number of other
important open source initiatives, using Eclipse as a platform as much
as possible.
This release provides three main capabilities within the Eclipse
environment, as follows:
• GUI artefact generation: Opereffa uses Java Server Faces as its GUI
layer, and provided DOJO toolkit support for AJAX and widget support.
GUI artefacts are connected to components providing back end
functionality via the JSF expression language. Although it is entirely
possible to create these GUI artefacts manually, this is an error prone
and time consuming process. The new plugin provides functionality for
automatic generation of GUI artefacts, with a couple of clicks. They can
be manually modified, as required, later.
• Archetype structure browsing: During development, it is often
necessary to view the structure of the archetype which is being used,
and, in addition to ADL and XML representations, more user-friendly
plane views are found to be useful. The plugin provides an Eclipse view
for browsing the structure of archetypes. Thanks to Dr. Sebastian Garde
of Ocean Informatics, it uses the same graphical icons as CKM, aiming to
provide a coherent view across all openEHR related tooling exposed from
the plugin.
• Context sensitive help and documentation: A common feature of many
modern development environments is context sensitive help. openEHR has a
great deal of high quality documentation, which has to be referred to,
often, in development processes. As an experiment, we have transformed a
subset of the openEHR documentation into XHTML format and linked it to
the content management framework for Eclipse Help. In this way, the
plugin provides access to the documentation relevant to chosen nodes
within the archetype view. Eclipse contains an internal browser for its
internal help documents and for linked content available online. We have
included links to the openEHR wiki and to CKM, all accessible from
within Eclipse by developers. This is currently a very simple link to
CKM, but it provides pointers for possible ways of integrating CKM with
Opereffa, using Eclipse as the unifying environment.
All these capabilities will be extended in the future, along with the
addition of new ones. It is our hope and aim that, in the near future,
the full lifecycle of an openEHR based application will be demonstrated
to be manageable within an open source and unified technology platform
based on Eclipse.
For a wiki page describing openEHR tooling based on Opereffa see:
(http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/projects/Tooling )
For details of the Eclipse plugin installation and screenshots showing
its usage, see:
(http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/projects/Opereffa+Eclipse+Plugin )
The plugin source file is available with other Opereffa Sourceforge
downloads at: (https://sourceforge.net/projects/opereffa/ ).
We hope that the community will provide feedback so that can move
forward with this critical aspect of openEHR implementation.
Seref Arikan, UCL, CHIME
Professor David Ingram, UCL, CHIME