It's a race
I’m not sure who’s going to make it out first, version 0.8 of HL7 Comm or the next build of Light HL7 Library (LHL). I had a need to address segment groups for a work project and I ended up having to do something hack-y, which is horribly embarrassing when you tell all your co-workers to use the library you created. That got me thinking, that the whole reason the LHL got created in the first place was to meet the needs of its users (well, me), and that after functionality was in place it was extended over time to make it more functional.
So I’ve since thought how I could make groups function reasonably at first, yet make it so that wrappers could be written to normalize the interface. This may mean I finish writing the damn thing and release it in a usable state rather than not release it while I try to craft the perfect interface the first time. It’s probably better to try and fail than not try, in other words. After all, we’d never have any version 2.0 software if we got it right the first time.
In other news, a fellow Healthcare IT sufferer, Ron Sweeney, told me that he’s using a utility called IKVM to make the Java libraries, like Light HL7 Library work with .NET stuff. Take a look at it here, and look around his site for some other interesting stuff. Thanks, Ron. By the way, he wrote me about that back in July, which should give you some idea about how freaking behind I am in everything.