Hello Community, am expressing my interest in contributing to this GSoC project involving replacing the OpenMRS Standalone with something that one can simply click and run, leveraging new supported technologies.
It is without doubt a challenging project and I am currently trying to understand the problem, then search out possible ways to solve it.
So I welcome any ideas, suggestions, pointers or directions…
Glad to see that you are interested in this. One of the main issues we have with the standalone is users can’t run it on the latest versions of Mac (After 2019). Additionally, the standalone version has become outdated. Our primary objective is to update and enhance it to ensure compatibility with the latest OpenMRS releases.
References: Some difficulty with setting up Standalone package
You can get a high-level overview of the standalone on the Wiki. The chief difficulty is creating something that a user can double-click on which will install and configure a suitable database. Previously, MySQL provided a JDBC driver called MXJ that would automatically start an embedded MySQL instance from a JDBC connection URL, which was key to making the standalone work. However, that product has been discontinued (so no longer receiving updates) and there were never binary versions for ARM-based processors (it was discontinued a long time ago, before ARM-based machines were popular). Basically, this project needs to either come up with a way of replacing that (there are a few options), rework OpenMRS to be able to run on an embedded Java-based database (we already use H2 for integration tests, so it’s probably easy).