Hi Roger,
It is true that I am a developer, but the issues I raise are one of
maintenance and support of our large implementations that contain many
modules with lots of complex dependencies. To the contrary of your
point, as the developer of many of these modules, I am comfortable
knowing what I need to install and maintain and why. My concern is that
the module framework does not give developers an easy way to hide these
complexities from the end user or implementer. This is my motivation here.
Mike
On 01/18/2012 08:24 AM, Friedman, Roger (CDC/CGH/DGHA) (CTR) wrote:
I find this entire thread a little disconcerting because it's all
developers raising problems that developers have because they're
constantly changing their configuration and bringing modules up and
down. Except for automatic download of dependencies, there seems to
be little in this thread useful to sysadmins, let alone users.
As for this particular suggestion, what's wrong with having my cool
utililties as a jar that's referenced in one or more modules? We
could keep them in contributions and the maven repo. Are your cool
utilities going to be designed generally enough and documented well
enough for others to use them? Are we dedicated enough to reuse that
we would bother to find the documentation and figure them out rather
than write our own?
*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] *On
Behalf Of *Michael Seaton
*Sent:* Friday, January 13, 2012 10:14 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [OPENMRS-IMPLEMENTERS] 1.10 MUST have
I'm really happy that Rafal has raised this and would love to see many
of the improvements raised here.
To Mark's point, let's say I have a few useful utility classes methods
that I have written in a module and I find myself copying / re-writing
these in many of my other modules. Obviously it would be better to be
able to maintain this code in one place and use it within my modules,
rather than try to maintain it in multiple places. Right now, the
only real way to do that would be to create a new OpenMRS module with
these utility classes, and to make all of my other modules require it
as a dependency. The problem with this is that an implementer has to
actually do find the "MyCoolUtilities" module and install it in order
to install the module that has the actual feature that they care
about. This utility module really has no meaning to them and is
really an implementation detail. The reporting module is sort of like
this - you have to install the "serialization.xstream" module and the
"htmlwidgets" module before you can install the reporting module.
Neither of these modules provide any UI components or features to an
end-user, and are basically meaningless to an implementer. But the
implementer needs to find them, install them, and maintain them
nonetheless. I think this is an area we could improve with some thought.
I also want to strongly second the notion of trying to think through
ways where we can make it easy for modules to bundle support for
multiple (incompatible) OpenMRS versions, and to provide integration
features between itself and one or more other modules that are
optional. Rafal's examples are all on point.
I would love to see this topic continue to be discussed, perhaps on an
upcoming design or developers call...
Thanks,
Mike
On 01/13/2012 03:15 PM, Burke Mamlin wrote:
Mark, can you think about how/why module management in OpenMRS feels
"thick" to you? Both Eclipse & OpenMRS list their plugins/modules and
let you manage them. Why in particular does Eclipse – with many more
plugins – feel lighter to you?
+1 for improving module management (in fact, Shazin did this for GSoC
a couple years ago and it never got committed)
+1 for ways to make it easier to handle dependencies (like including
them with an omod or making the module manager capable of grabbing
them for you if you have internet connectivity)
I'm not excited (at least at first blush) about trying to make
multiple modules (a module & its dependencies) look like a single
module in the module manager, since dependencies are not 1-to-many
(they're many-to-many).
-Burke
On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Mark Goodrich <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Definitely a +1 here.
I think that modules should be lighter, or at least there should be a
lighter alternative. In Rwanda we are running 20+ modules, and we are
going to be approaching that number in Haiti. That seems like "too
much", but mainly because of the heaviness of module management. For
instance, if I check my installed Eclipse plug-ins I see that I have a
zillion installed--it is just much more transparent to me, and not
something I have to worry about on a day-to-day basis.
I envision some sort of dependency system, where if you download a
module that requires other modules, it can automatically download the
other dependencies for you.
Another idea I had was to build a module that simply contains a set of
related utility methods and/or services that I want to be able to use
in many different modules... but I'd like to be able to do this
without having to build a full OpenMRS module that implementers have
to install independently.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>] On
Behalf Of Rafal Korytkowski
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 12:01 PM
To: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: [OPENMRS-IMPLEMENTERS] 1.10 MUST have
Hey,
1.9 is almost out. I'd like to start a discussion on what to include
in 1.10.
Let's have a better module support! Module management needs to be
improved. We're saying OpenMRS is a modular architecture, but it's
hard to acknowledge working with the Manage Modules page.
I'm asking for a feature that allows to pack a few modules together in
a single omod which can be installed and managed as one.
Let's say we have HTML Form Entry and HTML Form Entry Designer.
There's no point in distributing HTML Form Entry Designer alone since
it requires HTML Form Entry to run.
The other example is still hypothetical. Let's say you want to share
reports from the Reporting module using the Metadata Sharing module.
For that to work you would need the ReportingMDSSupport module. Why
you need to know that? It should be packaged and managed by the
Reporting module. It's the Reporting module that should know that if
the Metadata Sharing module is started, it should start the
RerportingMDSSupport.
Going further, there's a great new feature in 1.9: visists. In order
for the HTML Form Entry module to make use of that you would need HTML
Form Entry 1.9 Compatibility module. And then comes 1.10 with even
better visits and you need yet another HTML Form Entry 1.10
Compatibility module. It's a management nightmare to install all those
modules and keep them running, but should be easily managed by the
HTML Form Entry itself which when installed on 1.9 should simply start
the 1.9 Compatibility feature.
Hope I explained the idea good enough! I'm waiting for thumbs up or
down for this idea!
-Rafal
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