[Gnumed-devel] GNUmed web interface

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

I am bringing this up every once in a while. There is no need to discuss the 
need for it again. I am simply interested in a proof of concept and collecting 
thoughts.

GNUmed has a wxpython based client. It is a wrapper around GTK on GNU/Linux. 
In the past I have wondered what it would take to hack a web interface for 
GNUmed.

There a far too many web toolkits to choose from. One of the ideas is to use a 
toolkit that will allow reuse of existing code as rewriting (e.g. the 
middleware) not feasible.

Toolkits that come to mind and have some userbase are Django, Turbogears and 
Pylons. All of them provide access to the PostgreSQL database and make use of 
python. However all of them are designed to talk to the database bypassing our 
middleware. Replicating the middleware makes no sense.

It is possible to reuse the midlleware we have. It can be done through XML-
RPC.

Mere chance has it I came across TinyERP Web on freshmeat. Digging a little 
deeper it looks like the solved the same problem.

They have a default GTK-Client and now came up with a web-client based on 
Turbogears. They use XML-RPC. I am not sure if they use it to access what I 
would call the middleware.

However if anyone wants to have a go at this here is their code to look at.

http://www.openerp.com/download/old/eTiny-1.0.1.1.tar.gz

If you are going to attempt that I recommend to:

- create a webbased log-in dialog which resembles the fat client dialog.
- reuse GNUmed's python middleware for the connection
- glue it together by using XML-RPC to talk to the middleware
- implement a page that shows that you are actually connected to the GNUmed 
database

There is a project called 'medical'. It tries to implement an EMR on top of 
OpenERP which is the current version of TinyERP - the software the above 
webinterface is for.

http://medical.sourceforge.net/

Have fun,
Sebastian