I think I missed the beginning of this thread. It appears to have started
out on another list.
John Gage wrote:
>First, a custom viewer is necessary/important/efficient/etc. for
>medicine. My impression, incidentally, is that a *lot* of venture money
>is going toward *custom* desktops/browsers/viewers for doctors: the idea
>being that if you capture the doctor's desktop you've captured a huge
>market: you go to American Express and say, "I can put your advertising,
>etc. on the desktop of 100,000 doctors," and you go to the doctor and
>say, "I can give you value added beyond your current desktop if you sign
>a long-term contract with me to provide a custom desktop." This is all
>commercial drivel, of course, that does not have anything to do with
>Brian's reasons, which are substantive. It's just to show the level of
>commercial interest in a custom viewer. Ultimately, Brian's reasons and
>more like them are what is important and will *actually* add value to
>the doctor's desktop.
>
>There is a much, much more important issue lurking here, which I believe
>has been touched on time and again in this forum but never really
>discussed directly (I think). Open source at the present time solves
>only one of the two major problems facing software developers: ease of
>access to powerful code. This is a terrific thing that, correctly, has
>turned the world on its ear. But the other problem remains: ease of
>development. By which I mean rapid application development tools that
>really work and are sustainable. When one scratches the surface of
>software development, one finds an *enormous* amount of commercial
>software written with rather primitive RAD tools. If I'm not mistaken,
>Lotus Notes is written in Visual Basic.
>
>The open source community must focus directly on a consensus surrounding
>easy to use, efficient, and robust RAD tools. My thought with Mozilla
>is that with just few important add-ons, one could "come to market" very
>quickly with a lot of value added for the physician. However, I am
>somewhat dismayed at the thought of embracing Javascript. Isn't
>Javascript a proprietary bizarre language that belongs to Netscape and
>is not really supported/described anywhere? Is the source to Javascript
>available? Everytime I've looked at Javascript, I've come away
>disturbed and perplexed. What am I missing?
John, I recall discussion this subject quite a bit 6-10 months ago on this
list. I am surprised that you have not yet run across the source for
Javascript nor mention of the ECMA standard for it on the Mozilla website.
You can download the source for the Mozilla javascript engine from there
separately or included with the whole mozilla source.
>
>John
>
>Brian Bray wrote:
>>
>> Yes, it's interesting that the Mozilla interface is written using XML
>> forms and Javascript. This makes it easy to change and customize for
>> the Mozilla folks, but it also opens the door for projects like DocScope
>> to use the core engine to build a custom viewer.
>>
>> Why is a custom viewer useful? The reasons are:
>>
>> - encryption of the medical record (and it's parts)
>> - verification of digital signatures for embedded portions of the record
>> - faster switching between alternate views (the server is not involved)
>>
>> -Brian
>>
>> "John S. Gage" a �crit :
>> >
>> > This has been an idea of mine for a long time (which is not to impute
>> > value to it, or precedence). A browser such as Mozilla is sort of a
>> > universal client: people have designed into it everything the client
>> > needs. Medicine is so very different that these same tools are not
adaptable?
>> > John
>> >
>> > "Bud P. Bruegger" wrote:
>> > >
>> > > What do you think of Mozilla as platform: see
>> > > Mozilla as an Application Virtual Machine:
>> > > http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/215
---------------------------------------
Jim Self
Manager and Chief Developer
VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis
(http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
