Distribution Module 1.0, Ready to Go!

I was a bit too optimistic earlier this week about what I'd be able to get done--a common programmer's curse--but I do have something pretty cool to report. I was able to put together version 1.0 of a new "Distribution module" for OpenMRS, that lets you package multiple OpenMRS modules into a single zip file, and install it in a single operation.

This is really key for us, since our distribution is going to contain a whole bunch of modules (listed below), and we're going to need a consistent way of upgrading them all, for many installations, with as little work as possible.

As an aside, I really want to push the OpenMRS community to make it much easier to build "distributions", that can be deployed widely, and upgraded easily. So hopefully this is a decent-sized first step. :-)

Later on we'll be adding a feature to that module so it can proactively download new versions of the distribution from a server, and alert the sysadmin that they can upgrade with one click. (I'd really like to work on that right now, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait a few weeks.)

Next week I'll be looking at what needs to happen to make the Metadata Sharing module work with OpenMRS 1.9. Rafal tells me it will load, but we can't share concepts yet because of the concept mapping-related data model changes. We need to make this work, so wish me luck!

If you're interested, we're currently planning for the first release of our distribution to include these modules:

• Kenya EMR
• UI Framework
• UI Library
• App Framework
• Metadata Sharing
• HTML Form Entry
• Reporting
• Serialization.xstream
• HTML Widgets