[Gnumed-devel] appointment handling - options

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

Appointment handling inside an app such as GNUmed seems to be desired. I guess 
this stems from the desire to schedule appointments from a patient plugin.

Anyway here are some thoughts on how to tackle this.

Most applications seem to reinvent this over and over again. Pretty soon you 
have yet another calendar. Only this time it is running inside your 
application. On top of it it does not communicate with other calendaring 
solutions since the devs usually don't spend the time to implement syncing and 
so on.

The way out could be to reuse an existing webbased solution. While technically 
any third party calendaring solution would work a webbased solution could be 
integrated into GNUmed (once 2.9.3 or higher is usable that is). A GNUmed 
appointment plugin would just be a pane holding a website (the appointment 
webinterface).

The caledarserver could be installed locally or offsite (or even Google 
calendar). This would work already. One possible app would be LuxCal.

Ideally we would look for a solution that has some sort of API. This API is 
then used to feed new appointments to the calendar from within GNUmed 
programatically. Google calendar has such an API and could therfore serve as a 
demo. However not many people would want to schedule their patients in a 
Google calendar.

One local caledar server supporting this  is Bedwork [1]

A plus is that apart from the Bedework webinterface being embedded into GNUmed 
one can access it from a Google calendar, iPhone, Mozilla calendar and more.

If you know of any other solutions apart from Bedeworks or Luxcal let me know.

It should have
a) a web interface
b) be installable cross platform
c) implement the calendaring standards
d) allow for appointments and
e) room managements

[1] http://www.jasig.org/bedework

Regards,
Sebastian