On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 21:19, Richard D Piper wrote: > An advantage of an https approach is that the software (except for the > ssl related client) is maintained centrally on a server, and a remotely > installed application (such as argus, which looks complex), does not > need to be installed and maintained. Just imagine the problems that > could occur with ensuring that version of a particular JVM's on the > workstations of 12,000 GPs throughout Australia.
Sure, but HTTPS browser-to-web server communication assumes that the practice is always connected to the Internet, which is usually not the case. It is the ubiquitous store-and-forward, asynchronous messaging infrastructure provided by SMTP email which makes it an attractive target. Also, Argus targets automated information exchange between applications, and browsers are not good automation targets, although the HTTPS protocol can certainly be used for automated data exchange (but each application then needs to handle its own store-and-forward buffering, unlike the SMTP infrastructure, which handles it for you). Of course, the Jabber protocol offers both synchronous and asynchronous messaging, and as Horst Herb has said (elsewhere), would be a better choice for healthcare secure messaging (with an encryption layer added). -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
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