On Dec 28, 2005, at 5:24 AM, Kevin Toppenberg wrote:
Unfortunately, as you note, you've been essentially painted into a corner by this choice of design (not yours!). One of the driving forces behind the move away from VistA is avoiding the type of coupling you describe here. CPRS is a traditional Win32 application (written in Delphi), leaving OLE Automation as the nearest thing to a plugin architecture, but this still requires containers. Even Microsoft is moving to .NET, among other things, to avoid the problem you describe. The traditional VistA menu system is at least seamlessly extensible (i.e., without requiring the modification of existing applications), and web based J2EE applications provide another approach (though I do not consider it ideal) which explains at least one reason for it's popularity. A real problem that needs to be addressed by VistA developers and adopters is how bring a plug-in architecture to GUI components, so that the basic application does not always need to be modified to support new enhancements. === Gregory Woodhouse "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." --Will Durant |
