Good afternoon to everyone, hope the end of the week is going well for
you.
I'm working with a group to study the feasibility of deploying Linux
based VOE, if and when it arrives, in our region. We are a rural area
and this may be an excellent opportunity for assisting regional
healthcare as well as demonstrating the feasibility of Linux/VOE.
Since the VOE sources seems to be largely locked up inside of the
Cache database on Windows we are studying other issues surrounding
complete Linux deployments. One of the most obvious and significant
problems seem to be with a graphical client for Linux desktops.
We have putzed endlessly with Wine/CPRS and quite frankly it isn't and
probably will never be a solution for deployment. Its fine for
hacking and experimenting but the unreliability would never support
production deployments.
The best interests of Linux/OSS/Vista will be best served by having
some type of native client capability. To this end we have invested a
fair amount of time and effort to understanding the 'RPC' broker
architecture being used with Vista/CPRS. Its RPC by definition only
since it bears no resemblance to the ONC/XDR RPC we all know and enjoy
in the UNIX world.
After a bit of time studying the FOIA XWB* sources and scrutinizing
packet traces we were able to develop a preliminary implementation of
a Java client architecture which knows how to talk to a Vista RPC
server/broker. Things are very, very crude but we have gotten far
enough to believe this approach is feasible, ie, we can issue 'RPC'
requests and get replies back from a Linux based FOIA server.
Before we invest any additional time and effort into this I wanted to
get a sense of what the community thought about this approach. People
are making noises about a WEB/HTML interface to Vista but my sense is
that something a LOT like CPRS is needed in the intermediate timeframe
to make Linux client implementations a reality.
I will look forward to any thoughts and suggestions the collective may
have.
Best wishes for a pleasant and enjoyable weekend from the northern plains.
As always,
Dr. G.W. Wettstein, Ph.D. Enjellic Systems Development, LLC.
4206 N. 19th Ave. Specializing in information infra-structure
Fargo, ND 58102 development.
PH: 701-281-1686
FAX: 701-281-3949 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what other people say you cannot do."
-- W. Bagehot
