The Tuberculosis Project project is one of the Sling users registered on the Sling user wiki page. This is an interview with developer Audrey Colbrant who worked on the project.
Audrey, can you please tell us a bit about the TibTec Tuberculosis Project? What are the project's aims and background?
The TB project is developed by Tibtec, a nonprofit technology center based in Dharamsala (India) and directed by M. Phuntsok DORJEE. The aim of the project was to build a system to monitor the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India, Nepal and Bhutan. Thanks to technology advances in mobile and web computing, it is now possible to design a recording and reporting web portal supporting the WHO DOTS protocol.
The project of monitoring the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India was born 1 year ago thanks to four actors: the DoH (Department of Health, Tibetan Government in Exile), Tibetan Delek Hospital (Gangchen Kyishong - India), AISPO (Italian Association for Solidarity Of Persons), and the Johns Hopkins University (USA). TibTec is working on a system for the above four actors.
The main goal of the project is to build a simple, low-cost and versatile framework so that communities all over the world could benefit from it. The system could be easily customized for other works as well since it based on open source software.
If you want to take a look at the architecture, follow the guide.
So how did you end up using Sling? Did you compare Sling against some other frameworks?
The implementation of the TB project was part of the master project in computer science of my university.
Jacques Lemordant, researcher in the WAM project at INRIA was in contact with M. Dorjee, CEO of TibTec, since several years.
Together they have defined headlines of the project and chosen the more efficient technologies to be used.
Sling was chosen because we are very familiar with XML technologies (RELAX NG, XPATH, XSLT...) and hierarchical representation of data.
Another point was the fact that we wanted to access data from Android (Apache http client) and a full REST API was the simplest way to access a JCR and manipulate data represented as trees. XML being very well supported in Android, Sling is a perfect match with Android to design agile mobile web framework.
Sling is also part of a course in mobile and web technologies as the master level of the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble.
Now that you have completed an implementation project with Sling are there any lessons learned you would like to share with the community?
The Sling approach is fairly new and I haven’t seen any other same kind of approach before. The concept is simple but it takes a little bit time to be used to the utilization. So never give up, solutions come slowly with perseverance.
If you had one free wish from the Sling committers...
Sling is a very interesting and powerful way to work with resources but difficult to handle for Sling beginners when you have a full and composite website to implement, mostly because of the lack of information on the internet.
The harder thing that gives me a lot of headaches was to find a good syntax to use that changes according to the technology you mix up.
So I think it could be helpful to have more tutorials on the syntax to use in each different case, what is better to do or not, and advice on choices to take in programming (for example I have met choices for protecting the access to the repository; choices about which kind of link is better to use: reference or path, etc).
It could be also good to finalize all links of this useful webpage
