[openEHR-announce] First release of a new Eclipse plugin for the Opereff
Dear members of the openEHR community,We would like to announce the first release of a new Eclipse plugin for the Opereffa framework. This contains all the current tooling provided by Opereffa and is expected to become the focus of all our tooling work in the Eclipse environment.
The plugin utilises the current codebase of Opereffa and can be used to work on any archetypes which stay within the current scope of its implementation. The test archetypes released with Opereffa can be used to explore use of the plugin.
Our planned scope in this tooling initiative is wide-ranging. It includes terminology integration, reporting, GUI artefact and source code generation, persistence, context-sensitive help, tutorials and more. We are working to connect the framework to a number of other important open source initiatives, using Eclipse as a platform as much as possible.
This release provides three main capabilities within the Eclipse environment, as follows:
• GUI artefact generation: Opereffa uses Java Server Faces as its GUI layer, and provided DOJO toolkit support for AJAX and widget support. GUI artefacts are connected to components providing back end functionality via the JSF expression language. Although it is entirely possible to create these GUI artefacts manually, this is an error prone and time consuming process. The new plugin provides functionality for automatic generation of GUI artefacts, with a couple of clicks. They can be manually modified, as required, later.
• Archetype structure browsing: During development, it is often necessary to view the structure of the archetype which is being used, and, in addition to ADL and XML representations, more user-friendly plane views are found to be useful. The plugin provides an Eclipse view for browsing the structure of archetypes. Thanks to Dr. Sebastian Garde of Ocean Informatics, it uses the same graphical icons as CKM, aiming to provide a coherent view across all openEHR related tooling exposed from the plugin.
• Context sensitive help and documentation: A common feature of many modern development environments is context sensitive help. openEHR has a great deal of high quality documentation, which has to be referred to, often, in development processes. As an experiment, we have transformed a subset of the openEHR documentation into XHTML format and linked it to the content management framework for Eclipse Help. In this way, the plugin provides access to the documentation relevant to chosen nodes within the archetype view. Eclipse contains an internal browser for its internal help documents and for linked content available online. We have included links to the openEHR wiki and to CKM, all accessible from within Eclipse by developers. This is currently a very simple link to CKM, but it provides pointers for possible ways of integrating CKM with Opereffa, using Eclipse as the unifying environment.
All these capabilities will be extended in the future, along with the addition of new ones. It is our hope and aim that, in the near future, the full lifecycle of an openEHR based application will be demonstrated to be manageable within an open source and unified technology platform based on Eclipse.
For a wiki page describing openEHR tooling based on Opereffa see: (http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/projects/Tooling ) For details of the Eclipse plugin installation and screenshots showing its usage, see: (http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/projects/Opereffa+Eclipse+Plugin ) The plugin source file is available with other Opereffa Sourceforge downloads at: (https://sourceforge.net/projects/opereffa/ ).
We hope that the community will provide feedback so that can move forward with this critical aspect of openEHR implementation.
Seref Arikan, UCL, CHIME Professor David Ingram, UCL, CHIME