Write Code! Save Lives!

It has been two weeks since I got the surprise mail from Google! Yes, I got accepted to the OpenMRS project : Longitudinal Data Review Module. My mentors are Sy Haas and Paul Biondich.

Since I was already working on tickets it wasn't hard for me to kick off and start with preparing for the project. On one side I was continuing with creating patches for the tickets and it really helped me to understand the OpenMRS code base. At the other side, I started to read and learn about the possible technology to be used to create the widget for the module. The possible candidates were : jQuery, GWT, GXT etc... As my mentor Sy suggested, I read about these technologies and did some sample apps following some tutorials. After initial reading, I decided to choose either GWT or GXT. GXT is an extended library of GWT. I did sample GWT applications using the GWT plugin for Eclipse. It was very easy to use the IDE to develop the applications. Then I tried samples with GXT and found that it has more features and GWT.

But there seems to be a drawback of using either GWT or GXT than normal JavaScript; that is the performance issues. Since there are some OpenMRS deployments used in less-speed internet connections. But according to my further reading I found that the latest version of GWT has handled it in a nicer way to make it efficient. So me and Sy decided to go with GXT. I started to read about integrating GXT with Spring and Hibernate as suggested by Sy.

Meanwhile I was looking in to the code base related to Patient data. I used the Patient dashboard in the web application to learn more about the Observations, Encounters and Concepts related to Patients. Finally I came up with some plans to break down the tasks to be done in to smaller steps. I will continue working with this and will finalize the requirements and timeline after discussing with my mentor Sy.

The first two weeks were full of new learning experiences! I am looking forward to learn more things in the coming two weeks and prepare my self well enough to start coding on May, 24th.

I had another good experience too in the last week. On last Saturday all four Sri Lankan OpenMRS interns met and had a good time sharing our experiences. It was a really nice experience to meet the talented guys Shazin, Ruwan and Firzhan. We are planning to have meetups in the future too...