Subject: Homework1 Resent-Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:39:11 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 13:48:24 -0400 From: "srikanth garimella" To: fox@csit.fsu.edu Homework1 --------- Srikanth V. Garimella SSN: 592-85-9880 If I were the Information Technology minister of India, I would like to start a project of building an online health care system which would make the lives of people easier by giving them easy access to online medical reports and a record of their health and their current health status, medical alerts from doctors, online appointments, online prescriptions etc., which would help them keeping a better track of their health. I would start this project because one of the main problems in India is the lack of a system which can keep track of the patient’s records and give the patient a faster and easier access to his health status so that more care can be taken regarding one’s health. This is going to be a distributed system consisting of a primary database, the components at the Health Care Centers, the clients at the drugstore or anywhere in the world, who can access the databases for their current health status or past records regarding their health . Description of the Project: This system would consist mainly of 1. A main database: This database stores all the health reports, medical prescriptions etc., of a person. It consists of such kind of reports for all the people in the country. 2. A main server to which all the other components of the distributed system connect to access the above mentioned database. 3. Each health center in the country has its own database (secondary database) of records of all the patients that visit their health center. It keeps records of the current health status, ongoing treatment for the patient, medical prescriptions for all the patients that attend their health center. This database in turn connects to the main database which keeps updating the patient’s records by appending, amending or modifying the existing records of the patient. So, basically the main database contains the complete, comprehensive and up-to-date information of a patient’s health. 4. This main database can be accessed anywhere in the country by the patient. The patient has a username and a password through which he accesses the secure database over secure Internet connections like SSL to maintain the privacy of the medical records of an individual. The patient even has the advantage of online prescriptions (that the doctor prescribed) which can be accessed at the drugstore through the Internet and buy the medicines accordingly. The patient gets medical alerts from doctors online. Whenever the deadline for some treatment is approaching, or if the doctor wants to give the patient some medical alerts about the current treatment, an alert message appears whenever the patient logs on to the main server’s database. The doctor gives an appointment to the patient and the patient can get to know about this by accessing the main server’s database online. Similarly, an appointment can be requested by the patient. Since this is a distributed system, a distributed application needs to be designed. XML can be used for this system because it maintains data in vendor-neutral, machine-readable data exchange format. The data being exchanged can be in XML Document Type Definitions (DTD) and Java can be used to communicate and process the XML DTDs between the client (the patient from any computer connected to the network or the secondary databases of the Health Centers) and the main server’s database by using JAVA RMI, or CORBA over the Internet Inter ORB Protocol etc., Below listed are some of the sites that helped me to think of the above mentioned project by giving a very good understanding of the concepts of a distributed system in the Internet and how it has to be designed. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-2000/jw-02-ssj-xml.html http://www.npaci.edu/DICE/Pubs/ieee-nov99/sld009.htm http://www.developerlife.com/dbsourceintro/default.htm#43036 http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/enterprise_apps/product/PIT20000719 S0014 http://java.sun.com/xml/ncfocus.html http://java.sun.com/xml/tutorial_intro.html These sites were very useful to understand the basic concepts of XML, JAVA, CORBA, IIOP etc., and let us know why these are so important in today’s Information Technology world. Distributed applications can be developed across the Internet using the core technologies of JAVA and XML. These sites give good understanding of why XML is better than HTML in building distributed applications due to its DTDs and give a good description of concepts such as Document Object Model of XML and parsers etc. They also explain how Java can be used as the core programming language in building these distributed applications in the Internet through JAVA RMI and how XML data can be parsed using Java XML parsers etc., They explain how the web can be viewed as a distributed Database with XML being its object model. The last two sites explains how HTML and XML originated and why they became so important in building real-time applications and also explain the advantages of XML and give a description of how to manipulate document contents using the Document Object Model. The Java XML tutorial is a very good tutorial to start learning to write XML code. Thanks and Regards, Srikanth Garimella. SSN: 592-85-9880 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: assignment1.doc assignment1.doc Type: Microsoft Word Document (application/msword) Encoding: base64