Appointments app is progressing, should be testable after this weekend.
Experience with Ruby/RoR so far is that 

(downside)
- I still find Python code more "natural" to read and write
- Python executes most things a lot faster than Ruby
- Python has more libraries available overall

(upside)
- RoR is the best designed framework I ever worked with. 
- RoR is the simplest to use framework I ever used
- RoR is the most complete framework I ever used (first ever "full stack" web 
app framework?) 
- RoR requires a lot less lines of code to achieve just about anything 
compared to just about any other framework / language
- all libraries relevant to EHR system development seem to be already there 
(and mature enough)
- the deployment system (Capistrano) makes deploying & maintaining any number 
of systems on any number of computers a breeze! (A wet dream of any support 
team!!! - remotely update with "single command" and undo (with single 
command) without risk for data loss if you don't like the update)  
read http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17 - mind boggling possibilities

- unit testing never was so easy!
- the automatic documentation system rocks
- the "gem" software repository rocks even more

For those genuinely interested (but who never played with RoR before) I'd 
recommend the O'Reilly book "Ruby on Rails - Up and Running" by Bruce Tate 
and Curt Hibbs - excellent stuff on just 150 easy to read pages, explaining 
all detalis really well. Gets you started.

A real treasure is Chad Fowler's "Rails Recipes" (Pragmatic Programmers 
series). Things like plug-in authentication, role based access authorization, 
and database versioning (incl audit trail and roll-back capabilities even 
*after* a transaction has been successfully committed ) - all these features 
so essential for an EHR system, all doable in RoR in about 10 lines of code 
or less - for the whole application. 
RoR + this book = EHR construction set for dummies! (dummies with extensive 
domain knowledge that is) 

Also bought and read "Ruby for Rails" by David A Black, but for those familiar 
with Python it is mostly superfluous; however, excellent introduction into 
Ruby for those not familiar with any of the "very high level" OO programming 
languages (like Python, Ruby, Squeak/Smalltalk-80, Scheme etc)

Horst
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