Hello GNUmed developers, I'm sorry it took so long to prepare a reply to Karsten's info about integration requirements, I'll try to also address some of the issues you have according to the mailinglist archives.
Basically I approached Karsten at a German Linux event and mentioned that an integration/interaction with KOrganizer might qualify as a student project for Google's Summer of Code, where KDE will once again be a mentoring organisation. Just doing KOrganizer interaction is unlikely enough for this purpose, since the students should have enough work for about three months "full time". However, depending on your needs and goals, it might be an option to extend this into a more generic PIM (personal information management) integration, i.e. appointments, contacts, possibly syncing with PDAs, etc. For any such integration there are basically two options: 1) GNUmed being the data source and KDE applications being used to handle visualization/input 2) KDE being the data source and the front end and GNUmed delegating tasks to KDE's PIM applications ad 1) KDE's PIM applications, e.g. addressbook, organizer, can have plugin based data sources (called resources) and if you already have the respective PIM data in your postgres database, handling this data through KDE applications should be doable by providing KDE PIM resource plugins which access your database. ad 2) this approach is closer to Karsten's suggestion of "remote" controlling KOrganizer through the DCOP inter-process-communication interface. From KDE's point of view this would be interesting in the sense of GNUmed being an ISV (independent software vendor) integrating with our platform, something we want to emphasise and encourage in the upcoming KDE4 era. Option (1) has the advantage that you stay in control of the data, i.e. a user can always switch to a different front end, option (2) has the advantage that the respective PIM framework can usually handle a variety of storage options, e.g. local files, groupware server, etc. Some of the questions I saw in the archives: - can KOrganizer run without "full KDE": one does not need to run a KDE desktop session in order to use KDE applications, for example it is quite common that usersof other desktop environments use K3b for CD burning or Amarok for music playing - what if KOrganizer isn't installed: as Karsten already mentioned, this can be detected at runtime. - what to do on proprietary platforms, e.g. Windows: neither KDE nor KOrganizer are currently available on Windows (only available as X11 applications on Mac OSX). This will be an option once KDE4.0 is released, but this is likely too far in the future for your needs (depends on your timeframe for this kind of features) Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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