Eclipse RCP demo version of ZEPRS

Originally posted Thu, 2006-10-12 11:37

Overview

I've noticed some interesting developments in the Java world that seem to have made it a very good platform for software that is deployed in the developing world. There's a project called Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RPC) that provides a very nice bootstrap to creating full applications. What RCP accomplishes is significant:

• It's open source (or soon will be - Sun has decided to take that path)
• Nice user interface toolkit (called SWT)
• Very good documentation
• Free development tools
• Easy-to-deploy
• Features a comprehensive update management mechanism.

The last two bits are particularly salient to me at the moment, because I've done some standalone deployments of ZEPRS which have been a tad burdensome to manage. Although the process of deploying ZEPRS has been refined to a point of executing a batch script, waiting, and sometimes crossing fingers, it's still a bit too McGyver-esque. Ideally I'd like something that works with a standard installer app that the user double-clicks or a zip file the user decompresses. Well, here we go: Zephyr:

Download Zephyr

You may download and extract the following file anywhere on your hard drive. You must have JRE 1.5 on your pc.

zephyr4.zip - 23.577 MB

Zephyr Features

When Liz started working with our group, she was calling Zeprs Zephyr, and I though it had a nice ring. Here's the splash screen:

Zephyr is currently a standalone version of the Zeprs application that includes its own embedded database, called Derby. Derby is an open source version of an IBM product called Cloudscape. It's a pretty feature-complete implementation of the SQL-92 standard. I've had to make a few tweaks to the SQL in ZEPRS, but nothing terribly drastic. Here's the screen you get once the app starts:

I've included only enough capabilities for a nurse to records patient visits - no reporting at all. I have not ported all of the form widgets - just enough for me to demonstrate basic functionality; nor have I ported all of the display functions, such as EDD calc. For reference, here's a screenshot of ZEPRS:

Upon clicking on a patient name, Zephyr uses the current logic in ZEPRS to take the user to her patient's current flow - i.e., if she's postnatal, it will take her to the postnatal tasks list. I've preserved some of the concepts in ZEPRS user interface - here's a patient from ZEPRS:

And here is a patient in Zephyr:

Buttons to different sections of the patient record are at the top of the page in Zephyr. These buttons will probably migrate up to the mostly empty bar next to the + sign (called the coolbar in Eclipse RCP lingo). Clicking on the lone + sign opens a new home/search page, enabling multiple patient record sessions.

The System-generated outcome/problem engine from ZEPRS ported fairly easily into Zephyr. This new version has a small enhancement from ZEPRS - mousing over an item in a list expands the text. Also note how multiple user sessions display - each window is named "Patient." I'd certainly attempt to re-name each window in the same way we handle ZEPRS window. This particular screenshot displays items from the Antepartem flow. In ZEPRS, we've got a nice view that renders these records into a single chart. I haven't implemented this in Zephyr; however, based on my experience implementing the regular forms, it should not pose too much of a challenge. The form rendering uses the same system in ZEPRS, which means that administrators can add forms/fields using the ZEPRS web interface.

Zephyr has a pretty high-level of interoperability with ZEPRS