The install went through for me almost without a hitch, i ran the OpenMRS SDK like it said which installed without a problem. After it installed i tried the omrs-version command in the command prompt to check if it had installed successfully. At first it said “Error: JAVA_HOME not found in your environment. Please set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the location of your Java Installation” after a quick Google search i did the command “set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_45″ i did the omrs-version command again and everything seemed to be in working order like it showed in the developers guide. Besides that i had no other problems with the installation.

From the blog Dhimitris CS Blog » CS401 by dnatsis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The wiki editing stuff that we did this week all seemed to be pretty straight forward, its not the hardest thing in the world to edit a wiki but i could see it getting annoying at times. The issue tracker activity was a good way to get a bit more familiar with the open mrs issue tracker. the definitions were easy to figure out just by reading some of the description on the site and just by browsing the site. Although the definitions were easy to find it forced you to use all the parts of the issue tracker which is a good way to get really comfortable with it. The GIT tutorials and homework was much like what we had done in class, it just shows how to use GIT and get more comfortable with it since it is a tool we will be using a lot. They were alright for the most part nothing ground breaking but good references if you get stuck somewhere which did seem to happen to me a few times.

I picked 3 introductory tickets that to me seemed like they could be accomplished, i tried to pick tickets that were not too hard since part of the problem at first is gonna be getting comfortable with the whole process that comes along with fixing an issue.

From the blog Dhimitris CS Blog » CS401 by dnatsis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The class that we had in irc was different to say the least. At first the silence was really weird for me but after a little bit of time in irc the conversations seemed to flow well and the class seemed to become quite normal, if anything with a little less clutter since everyone’s points are written out and become much easier to track. I thought the readings were quite interesting, i wave worked doing some it support in the past were they really focused on their ticketing system and good documentation. I was happy to see that some of these same things are used in open source development since it is something i feel i can do very well. I also like the part on the life cycle of the bug tracker i didn’t realize there were so many steps to be taken before the problem is even addressed.

From the blog Dhimitris CS Blog » CS401 by dnatsis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This class seems like it is going to be a lot different then some of the Computer Science classes that i have taken in the past. Up to now i feel like we have been doing just a lot of busy work type programming nothing that i feel is actually too practical. I think it will be very interesting to work on something a lot larger and more practical then in the past. I am also interested to see how the open source aspect will play out.

I feel like a lot of the ideas in The Cathedral and the Bazaar where things i was already familiar with but it was still a very informative article. Seeing the author first getting into this open source project and him starting to see all of the benefits of open source programming really helps reinforce some ideas that i was already familiar with.

The free vs. open article although interesting was not something that i particularly worry about.  The only difference that i could really see was that in some cases software under Open source initiative might have restrictions on who can release the executable version however the source code is still available. I see that free is more of an ideology versus open which is more about just getting a better piece of software but at the end of the day for me the differences are not really big enough to concern me.

I really liked reading the OpenMRS developers guide because it gave some background to what where going to be working on. Seems like the project is for a good cause and beneficial to many. The project is also very large containing 40 thousand lines of code and being used in many parts of the world. These things all seem very exciting and i am looking forward to working on this project

I haven’t used too much of Git or Irc however i did get both setup and working. I am interested in seeing how these things work more closely since both seem like great tools for making your life as a programmer and especially as programmer that’s part of a team much easier.

From the blog Dhimitris CS Blog » CS401 by dnatsis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.