GSoC planning during 2016-01-28 developer forum

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition is not free/open source software; in fact at USD $500 per year, it is a very expensive proprietary software product. We should not be recommending it as a default for our developers. (Caveat: Gratis licenses are available but only for established OpenMRS contributors.)

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Regarding the IDE, I had a talk with @darius. He actually had a point where he said that supporting one particular IDE would not be taking us in the right direction. Also, do you think it’s all that interesting a project? He said that we should be focusing on tools that are common between several developers. Here’s an IRC log of the same:

bholagabbar djazayeri: Hmm correct. What do you think of the bundled intellij package? 12:59 am djazayeri bholagabbar: or else tooling that makes it easier to deploy 1:00 am bholagabbar: personally I don’t like that idea (custom IDE) very much, because I think it takes us in the wrong direction 1:00 am bholagabbar djazayeri: Hm yeah. I’ll try and dig deeper! :slight_smile: 1:01 am djazayeri bholagabbar: i.e. we should work to make it easy for people to develop for OpenMRS in their own preferred IDE and workflow, not investing in a custom IDE that’s specifically for OpenMRS. 1:01 am bholagabbar: standard tooling >> custom tooling, as far as making it easier for a wide audience to participate in OpenMRS.

Regarding thinking of more projects, I’ve started my development and research on the Telecommunication module I mentioned during the dev meeting.

I’ve even been thinking of calling up centers listed on OpenMRS Atlas and asking them what do they specifically think is sort of missing. What do you think? @r0bby @ivange94 @burke ? :slightly_smiling:

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@bholagabbar during the dev meeting sound was not the best. Please can you elaborate more on what you have in mind about a telecommunications module. :slightly_smiling:

Sure. My apologies if I wasn’t able to convey my message clearly.

What I suggested was that we create a module that can integrate voice and video calling. The client can interact through an app of sorts. Also, as you suggested on IRC, we can also think of using the facebook API and try integrating the voice and chat services there :smiley:

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In addition to the @darius point of view are @burke thoughts, through which it might be clear that implementing an IDE might not be a priority for this GSOC as he was proposing that we should strike for projects that can produce meaningful features and tools for implementation and get the minimum viable product deployed by or near midterm.

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To expound on this:

We should try to make the OpenMRS development process as easy as possible, and also as standard as possible.

(The underlying reason is that building a custom IDE once is doable, but maintaining it is lots of work, and it’s “overhead” that I’d rather not make the OpenMRS community responsible for.)

If we are requiring special IDE configurations, this is a bad thing. And if someone is going to spend 3 months of effort, they should spend it on moving us towards standards, not on customizing a particular IDE (just one!) that we’ll need to invest effort in maintaining.

As a specific example, instead of maintaining the “unit test generator” (and potentially trying to expand it to more IDEs), we should actually get rid of this plugin, and shift towards using a standard code coverage tool, and standard TDD approaches.

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@darius Don’t you think that working on an OpenMRS IDE sort of diverges from directly contributing to OpenMRS as a whole? I mean people would work on an IDE that we developers would use to fix issues, but I feel like the ‘Contributing to OpenMRS’ point is being missed. Just my point of view.

In retrospection, I don’t think we need a custom IDE at all. The flexibility that OpenMRS currently provides is pretty awesome. It’s platform and tool agnostic to a large extent and is well ahead of most Open-Source project in general in this aspect.

A bit late to the party here I suppose. Hello! I have successfully migrated to AStudio without much hiccups along the way and set up the local server etc. (Pull request #103) I second @bholagabbar. [quote=“bholagabbar, post:22, topic:4476”] Don’t you think that working on an OpenMRS IDE sort of diverges from directly contributing to OpenMRS as a whole? [/quote]

In any case, studio is being quite actively developed. What I propose instead is to move on from legacy libraries to faster and better ones ( example, change apache http functions to use volley for better thread management) and achieve feature parity with the desktop version as soon as possible.

Following which, we could use the added mobility of Android devices for adding realtime chat features and working on the UX to make it more…professional and slick? (Yes, yes, it is opensource, doesn’t mean it cannot be beautiful! ). There is also scope for using mobile hardware for voice recognition or NLP for diagnosis, the latter of which will require some backend scripting to match natural language patient queries for preliminary diagnosis. Just some ideas!

I was wondering if the above things would/may lead to a GSoC project. Of course, I am looking for more ideas from the mentors and getting familiar with OpenMRS as we speak.

Hello all, I am Vishwajeet an Android Developer from India and GSOC 2016 aspirant, currently studying in my third year of undergrad in computer science. I want to contribute to the community of openMRS specifically in some android oriented project.Also I have previous experience of working in the Health IT sector (I worked for one project for Indian startup working in the same sector.), so I wanted to use my that knowledge here by contributing to openMRS projects. I am new to the openMRS community. As here discussion of upcoming GSOC ideas are taking place I want to know if there is android related project opportunity going to be there for GSOC 2016? PS-I found there is some description of telecomunnication in android app in todo list but I am not clear if it will be part of this year’s project ideas.

Thanks!

It’d be much more appropriate for our vision and values, to attempt to use open standards for chat/video/voice like WebRTC/XMPP, rather than to create dependencies on proprietary 3rd-party services like Facebook. :slightly_smiling:

We have not yet applied for GSoC 2016, and once we do, we will still have to be accepted by Google to participate, in order for there to be accepted project ideas. So keep watching things over the next weeks! :slightly_smiling:

Yes that I know, I just wanted to ask that if openMRS is interested in working on android based project or not for GSOC?

Hello Developers!! I am Parth Karkhanis from Spit,Mumbai,India.I have good working experience in android development and want to contribute to OpenMRS’ projects.Is there any good android project available for me to start solving bugs for?

@parthkarkhanis479, @avijitghosh82 Please refrain from asking such questions here, especially on this thread. I can’t stress enough on how important it is to read basic documentation first. There is a complete OpenMRS documentation guide which is available for you and all your questions.

Also, feel free to join openmrs on freenode IRC and I along with others would be happy to answer your questions. :slight_smile:

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A post was split to a new topic: Ideas from potential students for GSoC 2016 projects

I snooped around a little. It seems that WebRTC has libraries for making such stuff in java. So what I was thinking is that we can make a module on the server side, which simply needs to be added just like other module. The client side can be made as an android interface (probably embed the feature in the OpenMRS app). Does this sound feasible at all?

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Hi robby,

I went through the OpenMRS docs these days to have more insight for the community. Also got into the project of OpenMRS ID Dashboard User Management Dashboard. What will be the scope of this project? What are the resources that you’d prefer to get more insight about the scenario. I am capable of handling MongoDB and OpenLDAP. Have you worked on a wire-frame? Like to know more about current situation.

Thanks @ttcphilips

@ttcphilips, I replied off of this thread, it’s getting a bit hard to follow and should probably be split up based on project being discussed.

going to leave this post – even with the flagged post, it’s got useful information.

Please use the #community:gsoc category for all additional discussions about specific GSoC 2016 projects. Thank you!