Code-A-Thon

I attended the NHIN CONNECT Code-A-Thon in Portland, Oregon last week. It was two days of developers planning out and working on the next release of the NHIN CONNECT software (v2.3). There's a wiki up with notes from the two days worth of sessions.

But the interesting, relevant piece was when they started talking about future architecture. Two of the future topics (out of probably 20 or so) were grid computing and cloud computing. Because of the distributed nature of NHIN (CONNECT nodes everywhere), we had a short discussion about how data and computing power can be spread around in a distributed manner. Specifically, the question of hadoop and map-reduce was brought up about how jobs can be spread out over NHIN and NHIN-compatible systems.

On the whole, a pretty remarkable mini-con. This is a new approach to Federal open source projects and refreshing that OSS has come so far.

NHIN Connect 2.1 is in the lab

NHIN 2.1 is fully functional in the lab on a single VM. I like it. It is much nicer than the 2.0 version.

Testing is underway!

New NHIN Connect 2.1 released - initial feedback

Officially, the new release of the NHIN Connect software comes out tomorrow. Unofficially, it was located on the NHIN Connect web site on July 2nd. The release home is located at http://www.connectopensource.org/display/NHINR21/Release+2.1+Home even though this folder isn't in the main menu system at the time of this blog entry.

Here are some of the highlights:

1 - NHIN Adapter and Connector are now distributed as ONE pre-configured set-up. No more TWO-box solutions. ONE-box only!

2 - Documentation has been greatly improved. It isn't flawless, but it is definitely better.

For my next trick, I will be installing a NEW adapter+connector in the lab from scratch on a new VM to see a) how the install goes, but also b) how well the new adapter+connector system functions.

More to come...