How do I respond to critics who say that, if CorbaMed is the how of EMR,
then it is just another OS/API that has to be written to? I remember
when I first looked at it, I was turned off by the fact that it was
expressed in C++, which at the time, because I was up to my ears in
Java, I didn't want to be bothered with. Despite the fact that Corba's
promise is to make all OO languages talk to each other, so any
individual programmer can code away in any OO language to his heart's
content, isn't it the case that it's just another API, that slows
everything it touches down, and, like HL7 2.x serves to prop up a Tower
of Babel that no one needs to prop up?
Why do I say this (particularly because it's so politically incorrect)?
If we measure programming languages along a variety of axes, then two
stand out: interoperability and ease-of-use. Corba does not speak to
ease-of-use. In fact, Brian and Tim wrote Web CorbaScript specifically
to introduce ease-of-use into the Corba landscape. Corba speaks to
interoperability. But, interoperability assumes that everyone will be
using a different programming language, different operating system,
different database management system, different everything. Now, that
does exactly represent the current status of EMR, but does it
necessarily represent the future of EMR?
I don't think so. I think that when price competition starts to hit
medical software, programmers will settle on a singel OS and a single
database model, which will be dictated in large part by the excellent
standards work going on in the domain. The OS will be Linux (does IBM
agree with me?) and the database will be something that does
XML/Objects/SQL all at once.
I'm sorry this is controversial, but I would like to at least have this
point of view dismissed effectively.
John
