Background Reading

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting set up.  I’ve mostly got up an Eclipse development setup, and I’ve been reading up on various API documentation.  Not the most glamourous part of this summer’s project, but I’ve got to gain background.

As for the Web service side of things, I’ve been reading on the Javadocs for the packages javax.servlet and javax.servlet.http.  Quite useful information, paired with a reference.  As I read the documentation, I was also viewing some servlet examples that came paired with Tomcat, as well as part of Burke Mamlin’s implementation of a REST module for OpenMRS.

Good news on the Web service front: we may be able to use Burke’s module as the base for the web service module.  Burke’s may have implemented what we need, and I would simply add on handlers for the kinds of URLs that need to be handled.  We’re not sure yet if we’ll have to change some things (e.g., to handle multiple tokens), but for now this seems like a great help.

As for the BIRT side of things, I’ve been trying to read through APIs, but it’s harder to find them.  To some degree, it is described on the DTP Open Data Access Overview, but it says for “detail ODA API documentation, see its Javadoc API Reference Documentation included in the DTP download.”  The DTP download, as far as I can tell, is available from the Data Tools Platform Project download page, but the Javadocs are not well organized, at least if you ask me.

I have the source to the Flat File ODA Plugin, which as far as I can tell is just a CSV File Plugin.  I believe this will be the most indispensable reference I will have in building my ODA adapter.  The CSV driver is “an exemplary implementation of the DTP ODA run-time API,” so I believe that following in its example will be my best option.  It won’t be the easiest to program without a highly organized and accessible API documentation, but hey, that’s half the fun.