Nursing ideas somewhere between Drupal & Ruby

It's been a busy week:

• getting ready for the Scottish Ruby Conference [SRC] three fascinating days 7 - 9 April.
• checking with the client of the Drupal site, confirming that the following CSS3 adornments are not required: coloured lettering : 3D text : and others. KISS - OK!

SRC started with the charity day a day long tutorial from Chad Fowler author of The Passionate Programmer and Keavy McMinn. They delivered too - indeed it's all great! The venue - The Royal College of Physicians is quite amazing, full of history in its architecture and the portraits of esteemed members. Whether or not I attend a session in there today I must visit the library. The charity day covered:

• Blocks and bindings
• The Ruby object model
• Meta-programming
• Hooks, callbacks, and reflection.

When it came to the exercises I let the experts do their thing and followed the solutions. I missed last year's Ruby bash so it's good to be back.

Swapping to Ruby while tinkering with Drupal is not a help and yet there is overlap. GIT is the must-do within both communities. PHPNW's meeting on Wednesday on OOP with Lorna Mitchell highlighted some common aspects. I'm probably getting a lot of this (as in 'all' plain) wrong but Lorna's mention of $this and static methods sent me on a reverie. ...

Abstract classes are apparently incomplete and $this is not available to them. Suddenly I'm thinking well that's different. In nursing our abstractions on nursing care are complete - in the idealised sense. It's the concrete / practical (dynamic) delivery that sadly falls short.

PHPNW - the conference in October, a Saturday event in prospect and being here in Edinburgh reminds me I have this itch. Dave Hoover's keynote spoke about his career and finding his technical groove from a therapeutic role as a psychologist.

One thing I do know: from the books he mentioned I ain't got 10,000 hours. That's why I am trying to leverage Drupal and in Ruby - the Rails framework. There's an IDE I have just learned of JetBrain's Ruby Mine.

(Despite that) I'm reading Martin Fowler's book on Domain Specific Languages. Not because I'm going to write one (or like rashes), but because I'm totally intrigued and wondering about a research question. What question(s) can I ask that I might also be able to answer (or not)?

method_missing, meta programming and DSLs are still here in Edinburgh. No longer the latest and greatest (Jim Weirich suggested that was c.2006), but then neither are models of nursing. ;-)

In his book, Fowler identifies 'illustrative programming'. Spreadsheets are the key example and quite remarkable in how they are used and the niche they occupy from a programming, DSL, and an everyday tool perspective.

Hodges' model is a spreadsheet; or a decision table of sorts. Basically, does the patient have a problem in each of the care domains? Fowler writes:

The key benefits of a DSL - greater productivity and communications with domain experts - really kick in when you are using an alternative computational model. Domain experts often think about their problems in a nonimperative way, such as via a decision table. An Adaptive Model allows you allows you capture their way of thinking more directly in a program and the DSL allows you to communicate that representation more clearly to them (and yourself). p.116.

I'm really taking liberties with definitions. My domain experts might actually be student nurses.

I know book titles are intended to sell, but I look at the title of Chad Fowler's book above and wonder about the Compassionate Care Programmer and what alternative computational models may be needed to achieve that?

Fowler, M. (2010) Domain Specific Languages: Addison-Wesley Signature Series, Addison-Wesley Professional.

Hooks - Blogs and Mental Health Care

It seems I'm surrounded by hooks. VanDyk's Pro Drupal book is chock-full of them, so too Ruby (and Rails?).

Sitting and listening to a couple of clients in particular I'm busy trying to locate the hooks:

• those I need to avoid (get one of these stuck in your lip and you'll end up talking gibberish);
• those I need to find as ways to move 'things' forward.

So, health care and programming are worlds apart?: don't you believe it!

The book I've to review has arrived Mercer's Drupal 6. I've Drupal 6.2 installed and having been exploring Netbeans and JRuby it's time to revisit the future site c/o Drupal.

Without direct comparison so far the text seems to follow the format of Mercer's previous Drupal 4.7 text. The explanation about Drupal menus - primary and secondary links is really helpful, I'll check this out this week. I've come to the conclusion that Hodges' model needs a forum, encouraged by Mercer's discussion of user roles, permissions and the need to provide a hub for a h2cm community. I've started to map the forum out having also settled on an existing theme. I'd like to avoid the usual 'nursing' forum categories, but this may be difficult. The existing subdivisions are not accidental, so would forums on holistic care and domain specific care be feasible? A key aim is to demonstrate how Hodges' model can also be applied in social care, informatics, education and other fields.

My exposure to NetBeans this past week has highlighted a need to (finally) read about MySQL which is essential for Drupal too. Reading the jQuery book makes a specific glossary page seem redundant, we'll see.

The idea of a community made me think about a conceptual currency - something concrete to help drive development and interchange. About 7-8 years ago when XML was emerging I'd wondered about creating an XML format for Hodges' model. I may still have the e-mails from a couple of people who were interested in this. There was even a web page that included mention of HCML - health career markup language.

In light of this I suppose my latching on to the development of domain specific languages is no surprise. XML has its limitations, but it would be brilliant to have a 'standard' template, a file format for Hodges' model upon which to place key care concepts. I suppose a Word document will suffice for now, but I do believe that much more is possible: hooked indeed. ...

Domain Specific Languages [I]

Even after a brief acquaintance with the h2cm web site and W2tQ, you'll appreciate the word domain is both hard and soft-wired into my consciousness. On first discovering Hodges' model, the four quadrants were clearly recognisable as knowledge domains.

As the website evolved and after consulting with Brian Hodges, 'Care Domains' was added to the model's title (which has also paid some dividends in search engine terms).

In the early days of hobbyist programming a major project would be to write a compiler. I'm sure I can recall several magazine articles on this (Practical Computing?); step-by-step of course.

Searching on 'domains' as I frequently do, it was inevitable I would come across DSLs or Domain Specific Languages, which instantly caught my attention. Here are some intros -

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainSpecificLanguage.html

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/domain-specific-languages