Why the XML Community Must Follow Medical Health Record Debate

[Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@gmail.com>]

The following articles have recently been posted on XML Today that may be of interest to this community:

Why the XML Community Must Follow Medical Health Record Debate

The issue of health care reform has loomed large recently with
President Obama's recent call to create a more comprehensive health
care system, and electronic health records have played a major part of
that debate. I had the ... dubious ... privilege a few years ago to
work on a patient medical health record system here in Canada for a
group of private investors, and discovered the hard way that, there are
a number of incredible difficult, intractable problems with putting
together such systems - even when you start with the base assumption
that you're working with XML content.

http://www.xmltoday.org/content/why-xml-community-must-follow-medical-health-record-debate

An Interview with David Lee, Creator of XML Shell

I've had quite an enjoyable time working with XML Shell, and was able to spend some time tadlking with David Lee, the creator of the shell program.

Kurt: When and how did you first get into XML?

David: My first exposure to XML was around 1999 when I was working as a consultant for Centubra Software (formerly Gupta). I was in tools division working on the "Centura Team Developer" project (CTD). CTD is a 4GL language for writing business software. I was on the team tasked with exposing XML as a native data type within CTD. At the time this meant supporting both a DOM representation and XPath natively within CTD. At the time I thought XPath was a very inefficient way to get at XML data but from a 4GL perspective it made good sense because it meant you could write in one line of CTD what may take hundreds of lines of C.

http://www.xmltoday.org/content/interview-david-lee-creator-xml-shell

XQuery as a Shell Language (Part 4) External Calls From XQuery

This is the last in the series on the XML Shell (xmlsh), created by David Lee. In talking with David recently, I brought up a question that I had been struggling with - was there any way within an XQuery script to call out to the shell and get results. At the time, David told me, there wasn't ... but a couple days later he wrote back and let me know that he'd been so intrigued by the possibilities that he nearly pulled an all-nighter to make it work. This he then submitted into a new, beta build for xmlsh which is now available for download on his website (http://www.xmlsh.org). Please note that this is very new functionality, and will only work with the 0.1.0.1 beta build and above.

http://www.xmltoday.org/content/xquery-shell-language-part-4-external-calls-xquery

I am gearing up to do a series on XForms 1.1 state of the art and implementations, and am interested in hearing from people in the XML community that are currently working with XForms in one incarnation or another from either an implementation or a deployment standpoint. What do you like about XForms, what are the biggest problems, which implementation are you working on (or supporting) and which do you think in general holds the greatest promise. You can answer here or email me directly at kurt.cagle@gmail.com.

Kurt Cagle
Managing Editor
http://xmlToday.org