Oh no - G+ogle!

It emerges that Google have been working on an application like MediBlog for a year or so and for some strange reason they've given the project the name "Weaver". This discovery has made us stop to think about whether we really want to persue the MediBlog project with a team of three enthusiasts: why bother if Google can throw 15 sqillion dollars and half of California's Uber-geeks at it? There are a few things we'll probably be doing differently and its possible that these innovations may never even get out of the Visio/Word stage - just because we've found out that Google are working in the same area.

Anyway, there are a few screenshots of the Google service around on the net, its interesting to see how Google have approached the problem and also the ensuing blog comments have highlighted a number of other existing services e.g. revolutionhealth.com and openhealthrecord.org which are in various stages on completion.

A few themes have emerged in the blogosphere:

1. "Don't trust 'em: Google are mad, bad and dangerous to know"

This was nicely countered by one comment that maybe the people who think this should use Weaver to look up what can be done to help them with "Feelings of paranoia" or Alzheimer's Disease. The current issue of The Economist dedicated a front page to just this question, neatly concluding that "As things stand today, Google has little to worry about. Most users continue to google with carefree abandon" with the caveats that:

"The test comes when the good times end. At that point shareholders will demand trade-offs in their favour".

"Besides the slow risk of calcification that comes with growth, there is also the risk that Nooglers (new Google staff) will dilute Google's un-evil values". They cited the example of Nick Leeson, the misguided criminal who gambled away Barings bank.

I suppose that we won't know what Google might do if the good times end, but Google's value also depends a lot on goodwill - if they get caught doing something really,really bad (e.g. somehow compromising private health records) then we could all decide to stop using them and the value of the company will reduce quite rapidly - shareholders will probably understand that and for that reason I doubt there will ever be much pressure for them to "turn evil". The Nick Leeson analogy is more realistic - a small bunch of criminals or fools could do something to release private information but that risk lies with every large (or small!) company.

2. Done right, this could be something really important and worthwhile (*)

This line of thinking suggests that Google is really a force for good and are the only ones who can really sort out this problem.

3. google.com/h9 still doesn't work :-/ it redirects to an "https" page with servicename = weaver

Someone found a link to it..

My current line of thinking is that there's always room for more than one player in any market so we should still continue to see if our ideas fly - at least until we have to dedicate serious money or time to it when the risks of "competing" head-on with Google will be more understood. In any case, Google haven't finished it yet - it won't be ready to help with the HistioNet project and in my opinion it will never be an appopriate tool for narrowly defined bepoke projects like that.

Persistence!

..not sure if I mentioned it earlier but just in case: after some debate, googling and consultation we decided that Hibernate is the best way of integrating data into our web application, so we've canned the idea of using Stored Procedures in favour of Java classes. Steve now has the database and has made some progress populating the JSFs with MySQL data via Hibernate.

Registration and Log in.

Well we've actually started work on the system. The first, prerequisite, application is "Registration and Log In". This actually proved to be more complicated than one might expect at first but is actually quite logical in hindsight.

Users need to register before they can log in, and when they've registered they need to maintain their details. Then they need to log out and then log in again... etc. This required some thought and a bit of time joining eBay again to see how they do it (thanks eBay). I created a "spec" in Visio, Mike has produced the data model in the MySQL database and we discussed & refined it with help from the nice Entity Relationship diagram that was produced from the MyEclipseIDE database tools, which reverse-engineered the database. So we now have the first part of the database designed and ready to go. Mike produced a script to build the database and populate the various drop-down fields then emailed it to me & Steve so we could reproduce it locally simply by running the script in either the MySQL Query Browser or the MyEclipseIDE SQL tool.

This first version now includes the rather irritating but essential capability of supporting different languages. This makes it quite tedious for some jobs because some Lookup tables need an entry for every language we want to support - and of course we need to be careful about using Unicode. Initially we will be concentrating on English and French.

While we're on the subject of languages, Steve has found the best way to handle multiple languages with JSFs - all you need is a bundle for each language and away you go. You still need to maintain them though!

US$2.56

Well, this Blog must be storming ahead in the channel charts - I've now earned US$2.56 from Google Ads. Crikey!

Can't have too many TLAs & FLAs

For the more recent incarnation of the Medys concept I've always had the vision of collaboration rather than world domination, hence the plan is to build the application and serve up the functionality as SOAP web services to anyone what wants to use them. To make life even easier we'll produce some WSRPs, despite the fact that these are apparently controversial I think its the easiest way to get our services out there. We'll showcase the Medys engine in our own site called MediBlog where we can also consume services from other organisations without confusing the brand. FYI architecture options on the current menu are Linux, MySQL, Stored Procedures, Glassfish, EJBs, JSF, WSRP and Liferay Portal.

While I'm here, I got an invitation to the Liferay/Alfresco conference (http://alfrescoliferay.osmeet.com/) which unfortunately is in LA - a nice opportunity to go there but can't really justify the time or money yet :(

New Team Member

I recently caught up with an old colleague who volunteered to help with some groundwork on the Java development. We called a meeting over lunch at a local restaurant and set out some objectives for the next couple of months so we now have some momentum for the first time: I'll resort to specifying what the application will do, MIKE will be the Db designer and STEVE will do all the hard work with Java. When we can say "hello" to the world we'll share up the work a bit more evenly. All looks very promising for the first time in ages.

Histio Net Update

The Histio Net application is in with the EU/DG Sanco people now and we have to wait until Sept for the next update. I'm still waiting on feedback about the Solaris servers - the upgrade is more or less on schedule and the best I can hope for there is to get something (or not) by October/November 2007. Whether they are likely to be useful or not, who knows?! We may be able to use them for the CORINTH (COnsortium Researching INto The Histiocytoses) which is a synergistic DNA study to be sponsored by the HRTrust too. As it happened, no one was too interested in trying out the different language communities I set up on the HRTrust.Org site.