The future of C2X

[balamouk]

A long time has passed since c2x appeared and a lot of things have
changed over the years.

PHP has become a more robust and business oriented language, a lot of
tools are disposable for developers and a lot of new business
strategies are available to help with the common day to day problems
that we encounter.

Localization and internationalization are now more easy that they used
to be, and php 6 promises even further improvements via Unicode
support. Creating user documentation is now much more easy via wiki’s
and Java script libraries can help a lot with designing rich and
practical UI.

I thing that the time is right to start a small revolution in c2x;
i’ll list here some suggestion that I think would be useful, they may
be right, may not; it’s up to the community to decide.

Printing

I think printing should be centralized, we should use a centralized
code to do that. Agatha with some improvements could ease the creation
of new print forms without the need to specify pdf coordinated by hand
as we actually do.

Localization

The current way c2x has of handling translation is very hard to
maintain and error prone. A migration to gettext could ease the
translation efforts and help c2x greaten it’s userbase.

Besides that there are strange cases like js_<lang>_sex_title.php
which is not used in any file.

Manual / Help files

We all know how hard it is to write, update c2x help files, that why
not use a wiki engine ? It would easy the process of maintenance of
the the help files, it’s much more easy to translate and this way we
could create a much needed manual, and have it updated automatically.

HL7

The actual implementation of HL7 is practically non existent. But the
we should discuss here about v2 or v3, and if it has to be part of
every module, or it should be and external library.

The Code….

Here are a lot of things that should be changed and and lot should be
deleted.

* First there is a lot of code that should be rewritten, think
about sql code inside the module code, which is not a good practice.
* Second there is no real separation of modules, module files are
scattered all around the directory tree, which makes even harder to
apply updates and change code around.
* Third , the code needs some major clean up; there is a lot of
unused code all over which makes further improvements difficult.

And a lot of other things that I didn’t mention.

UI

Major improvements should be done on the ui side, from simple things
as changing the tab interface from using images to simple js, to new
visualization of the ward, to the possibility of connecting a specific
user or group of users to a specific module – an example is the
Glasgow Coma Scale.

The notification system used in the labs, pharmacy, depot, technical
is a bit outdated, a little ajax could make it much more usable.

A new theming engine css based could help much more and ease the
creation of new UI.

Other scattered ideas..

Other things that could be helpful is we should start to use automatic
testing, modules can be installable from a central repository, the
possibility of connecting specific users to specific modules,etc.

Another thing is that we should avoid static configuration in files
like $OpenTimes in lang_<lang>_abteilung.php and preferably have them
stored in the db.

this mail could be even more lengthy, but I hope you understand my
point : c2x should evolve and it needs our help to do it!

[Jorge Jarrín]

Hello,

I have started to work with CARE2X about 5 months ago, great software. I
agree with you on the CARE2X revolution.

The people (doctors) I am helping right now have started to use
e-Groupware (http://www.egroupware.org) to handle their agendas and
patients, I don't want to compare e-Groupware with Care2X, but many of
the e-Groupware features would be used as model for the named Care2X
revolution, I encourage you and the CARE2X community to check this software.

Regards,
JJ.

--
Y todo lo que hagáis, hacedlo de corazón, como para el Señor
y no para los hombres..
Col 3:23

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[Gjergj Sheldija]

Hi,

egroupware is a really good solution, i've used it in a couple of projects here in alb.
regarding c3x, i  hope to have something written soon so we can start discussing
on it.
the main idea on which i'm working on is to have 3 or more separate components :
and EHR, a LIMS and a RIS. where the modules inside those components
communicate via SOAP to each other. besides that another idea is to use XForms
for the GUI and the whole communication to be xml, so it's more easy to transform
information between the different communication standarts, think HL7 v2, v3 EC 13606...

hope to have you're help to :)

regards
gjergji