Its tool time!!!

    Building OpenMRS was a bit of a challenge. In order to build the project several different resources along with source code was necessary. First things first I had to reinstall a Java Development Kit(JDK) which was simple and straight forward. 
   The next step was to set up a mysql server on my machine, since OpenMRS stores its records with mysql. I have use mysql before but I never actually had to set up a server so I consulted this site, which I thought would help make this process a lot easier. Setting up the server actually gave my a few errors even after I followed the prompts exactly so I will come back to that later.
   For Now i'm downloading the Subclipse, a plugin that integrates Subversion/SVN into Eclipse and Apache Maven, an open source build system that manages dependencies as well as trying to resinstall the mysql server.

Ubuntu

So my next big challenge is learning to use ubuntu which isn't required to build the project but I figured I should probably learn to use it some time, So here goes nothing. Side note I can't believe I made it all the way to senior year and never had to learn how to use it but I digress. Downloading Ubuntu now hopefully I will have better luck building it than I did on windows.

Subversion Update

 After a couple of mins downloading tortoise, I was able to successfully install and connected to the test repository. I messed around and tried uploading some files,downloading, and even making changes to files. Everything checked out so far. Tortotise even adds commands to the explorer menus so all you have to do is right-click on files and add them the repository which could prove to be very helpful in the future.  Setting up a server was not as hard as I thought it would be at first. After look at this page, I tried the first three under the windows section. The first two didn't want to cooperate but the third one, VisualSVN Server was a lot easier to set up it was quick and relatively painless. Its also very beginner friendly and easy to use. Using both Visual SVN and tortotise I was successfully able to create my own repository server

Subversion Fun

   Although I was some what familiar with how subversion works thanks to my time with Dr. Boetje in CSCI 362, I had not actually used it.  Since I've never used subversion before I figured I would log into the cirdles playground and just start pressing buttons and get a hang of subversion, sadly that wasn't the case. For some reason resnet didn't really like the server but that was no problem I went to the Computer Science lab and got much better results with cwwpa, but I still had a lot to learn. After logging the cirdles playground, I was able to visit all the folders currently in the repository. I was able to download/read these files but I couldn't do anything else with them so my next step was to download TortoiseSVN. After the download I will continue blog about my experiences with subversion

Bugs Bugs everywhere...

 My team has finally begun to look deeply into the openMRS project. We found out some interesting info about where this project all began. OpenMRS started in 2004 as a effort to store medical records in a way which makes it easy to summarize and analyze. This project was founded  by  Regenstrief Institute and Partners In Health. OpenMRS is currently used in several different countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Haiti, India, China, United States, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and many other places. Although this project  is far along in development my team and I quickly found a list of all the bugs that currently need fixing. One bug in particular we looked at was Add startDate and stopDate to Relationships, which is a simple "love bug" as some like to call it.
here is the description:

Relationships should support effective start and end dates.

Changes to data model:

• add relationship.start_date
• add relationship.end_date

Changes to domain objects:

• add Relationship.startDate
• add Relationship.endDate

Changes to API (needs further thought):

• add a variant of the getRelationshipsByPerson method with a Date effectiveDate parameter?
• add a variant of the getRelationships method with two Date parameters (for a range)?

Changes to UI (personRelationships portlet)

• Currently-active relationships should be shown above closed relationships
• If an existing relationship has date bounds, show them (in small text)
• Change the add relationship popup to allow an optional start date
• The [x] which currently pops up a delete function should give you the option of closing vs deleting

Hopefully we will be able to successfully fix and get this bug implemented.

Joining openMRS

On Tuesday, my team and I all joined openMRS's mailing list as well as their IRC channel. So far the IRC has been pretty dead for the most part. There was one person who was having trouble building openMRS and it took him about 15 mins so its not to dead but its not as active as I thought it would be. The Mailing list was was very interesting though. There are many bugs that need fixing and building the project can be a task, but the others working on this project are pretty so nice from what i've seen and they are always willing to help. Many forums I've been apart of often flame users for not using the search function for the forum, but the people on OpenMRs are very friendly. I read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and found it to be a very interesting piece. One key thing that stuck with me after reading this piece was you should never try to reinvent the wheel unless you absolutely have too, you should instead take the wheel and make it better.

And now the Fun Begins

Last Thursday 01/13 all the teams began looking at H/FOSS open source projects.  I was kind of intimidating at first because of how many different projects there were, but after diving in and look at many different sites my team and I were able to find many different projects. One project that stood out to me was  Project Possibility. Project Possibility  is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating groundbreaking open source software for persons with disabilities. Since I team is Team Handicapped I figure it make since that we did a project on software to help the disabled. Project Possibility is made up of several applications  all developed in java. Which is a language everyone in my team is familiar with.

Day One

 Its only Day one and i'm really excited to learn about open source projects. Plus i'm all set to go to POSSCON 2011. Going to read, "Teaching Open Source", now.