Hi,

I'm organizing a team attending Health Jam Seattle April 18-20

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_Jam

We will be porting the VA's VistA software frontends to Lazarus/Free Pascal. VistA is the IT infrastructure that runs the VA's hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics. It includes a complete Electronic Medical Record System.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WorldVistA#VistA

We are hoping some Lazarus/Free Pascal developers will join us.

VistA CPRS Delphi source statistices

Count of files by extension

.avi 1
.bak 21
.BMP 1
.bmp 117
.~bpl 1
.bpl 1
.cfg 5
.dcp 1
.dcr 5
.dcu 18
.ddp 236
.~ddp 74
.dfm 252
.~dfm 85
.dklang 1
.doc 1
.dof 5
.dpk 4
.~dpr 1
.dpr 1
.drc 5
.~dsk 1
.dsk 2
.dsm 1
.html 1
.jcf 1
.JDF 1
.JGF 1
.jpg 1
.jsb 1
.jsd 1
.JSS 1
.map 1
.old 1
.~pas 100
.pas 326
.rc 1
.res 10
.~tlb 1
.tlb 1
.~txt 1
.TXT 1
.txt 2
.vpw 1
.we 1

.pas files total 204651 lines

We hope to have gotten past compilation issues by the HealthJam, and be focusing on the necessary VCL
components missing from LCL. But we may still
be fighting compilation issues.

Been resisting the urge trying to extract the VCL calls from the code. Been hoping to get through the compilations and get the linker or somthing to give me a count.

Folks who are familiar with the CPRS code to a quick look at:

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Components

And noticed TFrame and TRichEdit are missing.
There's almost certainly more.

I made a couple stabs at converting to Lazarus.

Most recent on a Ubuntu box using the testing repos

lazarus 0.9.24 beta 5/11/07
free pascal 2.2.0-1

Getting "safecall" errors at compile time. I see stuff in the bug tracker about "safecall" runtime issues not resolve till 2.3.1

So next thing I need to do is find the right vintage of Lazarus/Free Pascal.

Is this an OLPC project or just a Jam to get the VistA going on Linux?

Getting "safecall" errors at compile time. I see stuff in the bug tracker about "safecall" runtime issues not resolve till 2.3.1

If you are going to Linux you probably don't need safecall anyway, and you can ifdef it out for FPC:

{$ifndef fpc}safecall;{$endif}

Depends I guess on exactly what you mean by OLPC project. And what your concerns are.

Has the WorldVistA project been officially endorsed by OLPC management? Not yet. I'm hoping it will be soon.

Is it targeted for a garden variety linux PC or the OLPC XO. Definitely the XO.

A commercial vendor already has a mono port that runs on Linux.

Will all work on this project be released under the GPL? Definitely!

The event is an OLPC Health Jam. There will be lots of other folks working on
OLPC Health related projects, and if you decide you don't like us or our project,
you can defect and join another team working on Medical Sensor hardware, health curriculum,...

If you attend the event, I'm sure you will find something fun, constructive, worthwhile...
Whether or not it is our project.

2008/3/14 Jon Bertrand :

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho <

Just getting started with Lazurus and FP. Is there a good place to put this so it applies to an entire project.

I didn't have any concern - heck it looks way cool. I was just suprised to see this on laptop.org.

It got me thinking I should try to get Laz going on my OLPC. That didn't occur to me.

I have some experience in porting Delphi components to LCL (See https://luipack.bountysource.com/) and i would be happy in helping. See some notes below

Will the code be shared between Delphi and Lazarus or it will be a fork? In the former option the work is harder.

TFrame is easy to be ported but you are in trouble with TRichEdit. I already researched for a TRichEdit control that does not relies in native win32 control and only found comercial
(http://www.trichview.com/). There's a port from a old version ( http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/RichView) but is read only. An alternative way is to find a suitable gtk2 control (i don't know any) an write a wrapper around it.

Another issue is if gtk1 widgetset is suitable for such work. I don't know if XO supports gtk1. The gtk2 widgetset is not as good as gtk1.

Can you post a link to the code, so i can take a look?

Luiz

Getting the Lazarus IDE as is up on the OLPC, would be a great thing to do.

And it would be really great if we could gather some folks who know Lazarus inside and out to work on the missing pieces necessary to port WorldVistA to the XO.

I see folks in the list archives wishing for TRichEdit and TFrame. Even if we
don't get everything we need for WorldVistA done at this HealthJam, we will probably succeed in making some people very happy with increased VCL coverage for LCL.

And we are in the process of organizing a HealthJamSW somewhere TBA in New Mexico in June or July.

2008/3/14 Jon Bertrand :

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Luiz Americo Pereira Camara <

Cool! Are you considering joining us in Seattle, or just helping out online? I'm expecting Seattle to be a lot of fun.

Will the code be shared between Delphi and Lazarus or it will be a fork? In the former option the work is harder.

I'm assuming it will all eventually get merged into the main Lazarus project.
I don't think any code will go into Delphi.
Hope there is no need for any fork.

Glad to hear TFrame is easy.

Don't care if it's really RichEdit underneath as long as we can come up with something that provides the user with similar functions, and we can write wrappers that reproduce the TRichEdit API so we don't have to tweak a lot of existing code. Before I discovered how well the Lazarus does with "Convert Delphi ...", I was considering a Coco/R <http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Projects/Coco/> based approach for translating one Pascal dialect to another. We may need to fall back to this if we have to translate from one API to another. (Or we may strip down the Lazarus parser and use it as the basis for a translator.

Will try a: yum install gtk1 on my XO and see what happens. Hmm. I have a vague recollection of trying something like that before and having problems because the gtk packages had "funny" names not quite what you might guess. Maybe, it was some other package. We'll see.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho suggested

If you are going to Linux you probably don't need safecall anyway, and you can ifdef it out for FPC:

{$ifndef fpc}safecall;{$endif}

I then asked if there was a good place to stuff this incantation so that it applies to an entire project.

Just online. Too far: Brazil.

Sorry, i was not referring to the improvements to Lazarus/LCL itself.

I was meaning if the code of the frontends will be shared between the current setup (win32/Delphi) and the new port (XO/Lazarus) or if each one will follow your own path.
The later is easier and you can even share the code no GUI related. By your comments below (using "Concert from Delphi" function) you will be following a separate path.

Luiz

please give more information

regards wim