{nule.org}

Update – 0.8.2 is now up, but the classpath.bsh example script isn’t working yet. I kind of got caught up with other things before I could figure out it.

I snuck out a 0.8.1 when it became obvious that there were some problems loading and saving beanshell scripts from the interactive beanshell editor. But in playing with the beanshell editor it became painfully clear that there were some serious usability issues with the editor, especially when a large file was being processed and it started hitting errors. To compensate the editor window now has another window to display the most recent error and to give you the option of continuing, continuing and ignoring subsequent errors, and, if errors are being ignore, to turn off ignoring errors (that is, resume pausing on errors). Error messages should now be simpler and make more sense as well. Hopefully this makes testing using the beanshell editor a lot less painful. Take a look at a screen capture here:

Screen capture

I’m also fixing some errors in the same beanshell scripts and adding another example (or two). A major feature I was planning for 0.9 was the ability to alter the classpath at runtime so your beanshell could call JDBC drivers or other things, like XMLRPC libraries, but after reading the documents (duh) it turns out that you can do this natively in beanshell. No work required. I’m adding a MySQL JDBC call to a sample script in this next version to demonstrate that.

I need to test this beanshell logic on a few more operating systems, then I’ll upload it here. 0.8 users should get the updates automatically. If I don’t get too worn out doing this I’m going to try for 0.9.8 of HL7 Browser tonight as well with some bugfixes.

Lastly – if you know a relatively easy way to provide syntax highlighting using a StyledEditorKit in Java I’d love to hear from you. Ideally there’s one supporting Java/beanshell already that I can plug in.

I never thought I was a bad person, so I was glad to have Softpedia confirm that the 5 main open-source projects that I have downloads for are all certified 100% spyware, malware and virus free. Hopefully you felt comfortable before downloading and running my software, but if not, this hopefully makes you feel a bit better.

Here are the five programs that were certified and their award certification pages:

HL7 Comm (home page) (certification)
HL7 Browser (home page) (certification)
HL7 Anon (home page) (certification)
JMd5Sum (home page) (certification)
JWepGen (home page) (certification)

Update: Just a quick note, the Softpedia downloads tend to point to the zip archives. You should try to use the JNLP if you can, as it will automatically keep your program up to date and it will work with your operating system to install application shortcuts in a logical place, like your start menu or applications folder.

Softpedia also has review pages for all the software above, and rest assured that all of these 5 certainly run on any of the supported Java platforms (i.e. Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc.), not just the platform pages in which they appear.

After a few more improvements and some updated documentation 0.8 is launching. This is the best tested HL7 Comm yet, and hopefully among the easiest to use, even as tons of new features are available. View the HL7 Comm link to the right to get the latest version or the Software tab at the top of the page. If you were already using the webstart from this page you should automatically get the latest version when you connect.

If you have any problems or suggestions for updates, don’t hesitate to contact me via the Contact link on the right.

Enjoy. I’ll be getting you a new version of the HL7 Browser soon.

I’ve updated the Light HL7 Library page here to include the latest version of that library, including the work around for extremely large messages that crashed some JVMs (notably, both Windows and Linux running the latest versions of Java). At the same time a user named Kiran contacted me to ask if the Javadoc could be made available for the library. That’s a good idea to have that on top of the sample code provided, so now your three places to look for API information and for samples are the main library page here, which includes some sample code, a slightly out of date example of the unit tests here and finally, the new API documents here.

Work is almost done on the newest HL7 Comm, as well as a new HL7 Browser to include the work-around for large messages. I lost a system hard-drive in a backup server this weekend, otherwise you’d probably have at least one of those by now. I did take a few minutes to update my NetBeans 6.1 Preview to include release candidates 1 and 2 as well, if you need some more light reading.