Had a great time at Scripps Healthcare today in San Diego. We had a great turn out of people for the advanced Iguana workshop going through the Iguana Apps. Here’s a few pictures.
It was fun to see people getting the value of what these little apps offer. It’s all about seeding an ecosystem layer on top of Iguana that enables our users to tackle problems that were previously pretty difficult. Iguana is unique in that the engine is flexible enough that you can build these applications on top of it. It makes a big difference.
I think everyone really got it. These apps provide a common tool chain that uses non proprietary, easily accessible technologies – jQuery and Javascript in the front end and Lua in the backend which makes it easy for our user base to begin and tweak and alter these things to solve interesting problems. That makes it easy for us to build these things in manner that is easy for our users to extend and modify.
Everyone could see the benefits of using the Channel Manager for better configuration management. And I think people found the concept of self describing web service interesting in it’s own right – it’s a powerful model for any vendor looking to scale their interfacing efforts while controlling cost. Also it provides a convenient way to write intuitive help for your own Lua modules using a friendly GUI.
It was interesting to see how people related to the introduction of dbs files. This gives an alternative human readable format that for database schema. It means one no longer needs to use vmd files for this purpose. Because the files have an easy to understand syntax it opens up the ability to do all sorts of creative things – want to generate a bunch of tables off the definition of an HL7 message? No problem – just script it out and we can share an app for that!
Automating unit tests with the GUI front end to run them and see the results was another thing which captured people’s imagination. It’s all part of building out the complete set of tools you need to take your integration to the next level.
So we’re going to be in LA tomorrow for another workshop and then Seattle on Thursday – good times ahead. This is all a big practice run leading up to our next annual user conference in September. It’s exciting – this is really helping to push the art of interfacing to a new level – as well being a lot of fun!
We will be developing more applications, polishing and refining the existing ones and showing how they can be used to solve useful problems and make it easier to manage integration.
It’s going to be a fun week. The future looks bright!
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