[PLUG] OpenEMR, doctors, and "chickens"

[Rich Shepard]

On Fri, 13 May 2011, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> OpenEMR is a web app based on php, with a mysql back end.

   How interesting. I'm trying to use CMS Made Simple which is also written
in PHP and uses ADOdb-lite for its default MySQL back end. While I had
version 1.8.4 working with postgres-8.x, I cannot get it working with
postgres-9.0.3 and cannot get help from the CMSMS, ADOdb, or PHP-postgres
communities. I understand that while it supposedly supports SQLite it does
so no better than it does postgres. From my perspective, this sucks big
time. I've been using postgres since 1997, and SQLite since 2003; I don't
want to install, maintain, and learn a third dbms to run a single
application.

   Yet, Ledger-123 (and its progenitor, SQL-Ledger) are also web-based apps
but they are written in Perl and can use many different rdbms back ends
(postgres is the most popular but not required) and many different browsers,
including text-based ones.

   This approach of allowing choices of database back ends and browser front
ends seems much more rational to me, particularly for open source
applications, than the approach of requiring MySQL (or at least not actively
supporting any other). Is this lock-in to one specific dbms back end due to
a single connecting layer, ADOdb-lite, that does not equally support all
open source back ends?

Rich