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I am a medical professional not a developer.. so go easy guys.. :)

I am trying to build a EMR (Electronic Medical Record) with Django. In fact I am already well into the project. I have done reasonable AJAX and jQuery integration with it.

I was trying to improve the front end and came across OpenLaszlo as a Open Source RIA solution. I was wondering if it was possible to integrate it to a Django or Python backend.

I could not find any references for this kind of integration on the internet.

There are some brief references to such an integration with Flex front end and PyAMF.

If yes I would be thankful if you can give some step by step advice.

Thanks in advance

easwar
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2 Answers2

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It is possible to have an OpenLaszlo server feed information to/from another django server. See Chapter 1: OpenLaszlo Architecture. This would require you to develop a soap, rest, or some other api access on your django site, in addition to developing a OpenLaszlo application.

Have you spent the time to document the flaws with the current UI? Have you sat potential users in front of the current implementation to get feedback? My recommendation is to not "fix" something until you can identify that there is a problem.

Manfre
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  • Hello @Manfre, Thanks for the answer. I will look into the Chapter you have linked. I dont have a problem with the current UI. I am developing it as a hobby and plan to release it as an opensource project on googlecode soon. I am using jQuery, jQueryUI with AJAX to get some level of interactivity. It is just that OpenLaszlo seemed to fit my brain the short time i played with it. So i was thinking if this could be useful as a front end.. I dont have much idea on developing SOAP / REST API, i guess that will require lot more reading. – easwar Aug 03 '11 at 17:47
  • Look in to django-piston (https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home) for a relatively easy way of adding a REST API to the django app. One of the biggest negatives to using OpenLaszlo is that it will add more complexity to the installation and require potentially installing another server/service to get the product up and running. – Manfre Aug 03 '11 at 18:09
  • Thanks so much, As you said, it is not because that i dislike the existing UI that i want to change it. So if the process is too much trouble i might stick with the existing stack of Django, jQuery, jQueryUI and some plugins.. I will certainly have a look at django-piston and post my experiences here.. – easwar Aug 03 '11 at 18:16
  • Not sure what Manfre means by "it will add more complexity to the installation". On the developer machine, you have to install OpenLaszlo with Tomcat, but for the deployment I don't see any added complexity. For my application, I normally use Ant to automatically build and deploy new versions of the OpenLaszlo client - which works without any problems. – raju-bitter Aug 06 '12 at 08:14
  • @r.bitter The added complexity is the need to install OpenLaszlo, create deployment scripts, integration testing, and potentially maintaining more machines for the infrastructure. – Manfre Aug 09 '12 at 20:14
  • The complexity can somewhat be reduced if you use the Ant build script I've provided here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11897892/how-to-build-an-openlaszlo-dhtml-application-using-apache-ant/11900508#11900508 – raju-bitter Aug 10 '12 at 11:17
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The OpenLaszlo platform supports communicating with any server that can receive HTTP POSTS (aka REST) from OpenLaszlo datasets and return an XML response.

If your server meets those requirements then yes, you can use OpenLaszlo to create an OpenLaszlo front-end to communicate with your server back-end.

Kmeixner
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