Open Source, Cloud-based Approach to Describing Solution Architectures

Mike Walker discusses in a recent issue of the Microsoft Architecture Journal a set of tools that can be used to document solution architectures - based, not surprisingly, on Microsoft tools. Together, these make up the Enterprise Architecture Toolkit.

Since I don't have a Windows Server to run Sharepoint (I could, presumably, use Azure), I came up with a similar application setup using open source or cloud-based tools:




The only thing that needs to be built is the manager ("gateway", in the chart above) which can be a RIA application whose role is to tie everything together. Sounds simple enough?

Mobile EHR

It makes sense for mobile carriers to get involved in the EHR arena. However, the way I see this done is via cloud-stored EHR info that is accessible through a handset; how else would you carry the record should you decide to move to another carrier?

I still think it is far fetched for a mobile carrier to roll out an entire HIS application though. There are so many verticals (all, practically) that make use of mobile communications one way or another, should mobile communications providers create solutions for everything?

And a 'global' mEHR, while a nice idea indeed, I think will be always hindered by competing standards and lack of acceptance - after all, even the mobile infrastructure worldwide is fragmented, CDMA, GPS, etc. Why would the application layer be any different?

Worth keeping an eye on though.

Google Maps knows where you are

This is way cool: if you connect to the Internet using WiFi, Google Maps 'knows' where you are and shows your location by default.

Slowly it is all coming together - the 'cloud' means that you can keep your data (and processes!) in one place, and you can access it (via WiFi) from anywhere, even using a lightweight client. Also both the client and the cloud backend 'know' where you are so functionality can be tailored to the time/location.

I'm not sure how much computing power is needed on the (portable) client - probably, only enough for rich media rendering. Other than specialized applications, most that an average user really needs should be easily done using a client that combines media/communication/lightweight computing services. I don't think iPhone is there yet (as the all-purpose 'client'), but perhaps a combination of iPhone and Kindle, three versions from now, might become just that.

XDb

Documentum/EMC offers a XML database named XDb. XProc is in fact designed to work with XDb.

Perhaps XML database is a misnomer. It really is a way of storing XML documents, without (apparently) enforcing any relational integrity constraints other than those defined by the DTD (and perhaps XLink, athough so far I don't know if XLink is declarative only). Therefore XDb and XProc work hand in hand, one allowing for the storage of XML documents, the other allowing for manipulation of those documents (and perhaps, in-place updates).

The logical design is therefore done at a superior level. The 'database' concept appears to function when various stored documents are manipulated as sets - XDb supports XQuery (preferred), also XPath and XPointer.

Each XML document is stored as a DOM.Document and can be manipulated using the standard methods (createAttribute, createTextNode, etc).

I can see a possible usage in, for example, GoogleHealth - where XDb would store well-formatted templates for charts, diagnoses, allergies, vaccines, etc, which would be populated for each patient encounter and loaded into GH.

While in normal usage write contention should not be an issue, I am curious how does XDb deal with document versioning and multiple writes against the same documents - or is the R/W pipe single throttled? (later - here it is - clicking Refresh in the Db manager while an update process was underway yielded the following error:)



Interesting XML database reference information here.

XProc

Documentum's XProc XDesigner - a first step towards I see as a full online development environment, although this is more similar to Yahoo Pipes. The technology is there (web-based GUI + cloud for compilation and even possibly for deployment), I think it's only a matter of finding a way of monetizing it by tool developers. Is Microsoft really making money on Visual Studio though?

Over mashed-up

It occurred to me that I started this blog to, well, blog about my thoughts on various aspects of computing. A while ago though, this became my testing ground for various mashups, widgets, embedded code, and so on - mainly because Blogspot Blogger allows for all kinds of code to be inserted, which Wordpress (free hosted Wordpress, that is) doesn't. Anyway, this doesn't make for a nice reading experience, so perhaps it is time I should refocus on writing and move the coding elsewhere.

An interesting experiment

And worth reading... if I can find the time.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Platform Convertor Strategy Analysis

A work in progress, a consulting project that discusses the positioning of a platform convertor.

Platform Convertor Strategy Analysis

View more documents from Razvan julian Petrescu.

Visualization, again

Visualization of data seems to be the new new wave of BI. Already mentioned IBM's offering a few months ago, but are quite a few other players in this space, startups with interesting products, such as TableauDesktop, Omniscope, and even SAP has a product (Xcelsius), or research institutions (such as Stanford with Protovis).

What can I say: Tufte meets SQL. And perhaps Processing should get in the game - surprised I haven't seen any rich visualization libraries for it - yet.

Modeling

The RUP (rational unified process) is very nice, and so is UML. For smaller projects though, the following will do:



I would really like to know how much code is written according to diagrams. The mental image that programmers have of a problem's universe is a fascinating topic indeed - and far reaching, since how a software system works determines, ultimately, how a user has to work to accommodate the system.

HealthVault

Yes it does have an API, and some sample apps. The .NET samples include a web application to talk to the service - however, I give up on it for the time being as the utility to make certificates seems to crash all the time (nice unhandled error, by the way; the crash seems related to the fact that the app is installed in Program Files as opposed to Documents, and Visual Studio doesn't have full rights to PF). Will come back to it later, but so far it is remarkably similar to Google Health.

One additional thing, the SDK features some device drivers to enable medical devices to talk directly to HV. Nice - as long as they don't cause any crashes...

AIR and Google Health

Recently I've been tinkering with AIR and Google Health (GH). It's been surprisingly easy, if one can overlook the endless stream of XML returned by GH - but there is no other way, HL7 would be just as nasty looking. I don't know yet how it returns the file/image data that can be attached to the GH account.

AIR seems an ideal environment to build a desktop client to front a GH cloud-based application: it's lightweight, Javascript-compatible, and portable across platforms.



Speaking of, it seems that AIR will be ported to mobiles as well. I would argue that the paragraph above (and not just the stronger OO features found in Flash and available to AIR) is a strong reason to do this port, although I am not sure how easy is to develop and maintain AIR applications, and also I am not sure how well do these applications perform given the several layers of virtual environments they have to execute in.

Will write more thoughts as soon as I finish the small scale project I am working on right now, 4-5 forms of reduced complexity (but with a significant amount of functionality built in; the underpinnings of this relatively simple project are amazingly complex and would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago).

I haven't looked at Google Tables yet, but read some things about YQL and can see a scenario where medical (and other) personal information (e.g. reverse phone lookups, credit history, white and yellow pages) is queriable over the web via a SQL-type of language with the right security in place. In fact, the infrastructure already exists! So it would be just a mater of connecting the pipes.

And, I haven't even started to look at HealthVault's API (if it has one).

A map of where I've been

LinkedIn widget

My LinkedIn Profile.

Donkey Kong

I never really played this game in the 80's - it seemed to be available only on computers I did not own, such as the C64. I can, finally - will someone make a Sentinel widgety game available please?



Whatever one thinks of video games, I find it amazing that today you can run what was once a significant programming effort in a 'virtual' OS through several layers of interpreted code (widget > flash > browser > OS process > ...). I wonder how similar is the machine code ultimately generated on the OS to the machine code of the original program :)

Slideshare

Some of the academic presentations I have worked on can be found here.

LiveEarth

More tweets visualizations

For quite some time now I have been finding visualizations cool. There is a whole list of blogs and web sites dedicated to this rather obscure area of - computing? Web 2.0? It's an Edward Tufte-meets-open source type of thing... and even (SF) author Bruce Sterling is in on the game. And now, even IBM: they too are visualizing tweets (real-time Internet seems to be the in thing now). Still unsure about the usefulness of it all, but it makes for nice mind-map-like charting.

Visualizing tweets live

I'm not sure how useful it is, but it's certainly cool: Twittervision.

Virtual Worlds in Asia

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Virtual Worlds in Asia

View more presentations from Benjamin Joffe.