{nule.org}

I’ve actually been busy working on stuff for nule.org, as well as stuff not as related, so I figured I should drop a note about what’s going on.

First off, my attempts at fund-raising for the site and my now due bandwidth bill failed immensely. Exactly one donor came forward (of the 2200 people that saw the dedicated banner ad during the two weeks I ran it, and not counting the 3000 or so unique monthly visitors that I get that always see the side-bar donate button). That donation is highly appreciated, but covers about 4% of one year of my hosting costs. If each of those 2000 or so people that saw that ad gave only one dollar (not counting paypal’s cut), that would cover my costs for almost four years, not including, of course, the hundreds of hours I put into developing the utilities.

I can’t say I’m surprised, really, or even disappointed, but I am going to make more of a point of it in the future. I will be placing donate buttons next to all of the “install” links, and future versions of the application will likely have donate links in the help or about menus, as they get updated. I do want to make clear that my costs of distributing the software are rising and aren’t covered by any sponsorship, but at the same time I’m not going to resort to annoying tactics like pop-ups or nag boxes in the apps. I also am not interested in moving hosting to sourceforge or any other free hosting, as I don’t feel those services offer the level of reliability that I currently can, or are lacking in features that have let me (hopefully) make the site easier to dig through for those that come to get the software or help for the software.

In other news three new things are in progress right now. First, the nule.org support BBS at http://thot.us/comm/index.php?c=3 has a new forum dedicated to posting useful code snippits. Hopefully that will keep them apart from other support queries, and can form a repository of BSH logic scripts, configurations, or java code that implements the various key functionality that the code here provides. Right now a demo implementation of a very simple ProcessorAgent has been posted there until I dig up other useful things to post (or someone else helps me out doing so).

Next, a new version of both the Light Hl7 Library and Integrate Client Library are coming. The IC library is getting beefed up javadoc (yay), and the LHL should be receiving rudimentary segment group support (finally). It’d be grand if someone wanted to help think up, or better yet – write – some test cases regarding segment groups, as I may not have accounted for every conceivable scenario (in fact, it’s safe to say I haven’t).

Lastly, HCM 0.2 is progressing well. I think the way I’ve decided to handle database connections required for both configuration and message queues are to make the administrator define two C3P0 connection pools and provide the libraries for the database within the Tomcat install. The engine will run without these, but you won’t be able to create message queues nor perform in-engine configurations. In other words, like the 0.1.x line you can run existing HL7 Comm configs, but only but not create new ones within your admin GUI (which is the ultimate intent of the GUI), including defining error notifications, nor use the planned message queue handlers. 0.2 should include an improved GUI as well as the ability to define the C3P0 data sources, though I’m not yet certain what they’ll be used for in this version. I think I’d like to get the admin configuration stuff working before concentration on message queues, as that functionality can currently be emulated using file-in/out client (which is less than ideal).