Ruby-dicom in production env?

[niels hamaker]

Dear ruby-dicom devs and users,

Currently, I'm investigating setting up a DICOM interface for an existing medical meeting (eMDT) platform for one of our customers. We are seriously thinking about using ruby-dicom for this, which appears to be a very well written piece of software, my compliments for that. I hope we can contribute something back to the project, if the need arises.

I was hoping you could give me your personal opinion or experience on running ruby-dicom DServer  in a production environment? I understand that I cannot derive any rights from that, and giving that opinion will not place any burden or responsibility on you.

We expect volumes of images to be files transferred to be low, so performance is not a big concern. We would be mainly interested in your experience around robustness: does the application require any attention while running, or does it take care of errors well?

Also, the project hasn't received many updates over the last years. Of course, DICOM hasn't changed over the years, so ruby-dicom doesn't need to either. In this case, am I correct to see the low number of recent commits as a sign of project maturity rather then want of attention?

Many thanks for reading this,

with kind regards,

Niels Hamaker

[Christoffer Lervåg]

Dear Niels

Thank you for showing an interest for using the ruby-dicom gem for your project!

I believe that using the ruby-dicom dicom server (DServer) in a low volume environment should present few problems. I have never experienced any stability issues myself with DServer, but I should also admit that I have only used it for very "light" apllications. I do believe though that there are other developers/users who have probably used DServer in more demanding situations than me, and if any of you are following this google group please feel free to let us know your experience.

You are right that the number of commits in this project has been decreasing the last several years. I know this can look worrisome, but I think it is due mostly to the fact that the ruby-dicom library is fairly mature and it does what it needs to do. It may also be a sign of decreasing popularity of Ruby as a language (with people moving to other languages like Python). But I can assure you that I still maintain this library, and as you can see on the commits page I still try to fix issues that are reported. Its just not that often that issues are reported any more!

I welcome you to try out the ruby-dicom library for your project, and please dont hesitate to ask for help, or report issues if you do run into any!

Best regards,

Chris