InfoQ Article

Check out the InfoQ article: Real world JRuby on Rails: Infectious disease reporting and management

Here is the intro:

JRuby and JRuby on Rails continue to being adopted by many projects. After Mingle, Oracle Mix or Sun's rewrite of mediacast.sun.com, a new project using JRuby on Rails has surfaced.

From the press release Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), the company that brings like-minded organizations together to work on collaborative software at a fraction of the cost, today announced the release of the first open source, web-based infectious disease reporting and management system.

The disease reporting and management system, which is being piloted in Utah, will be adaptable in all 50 states and available under an open source license later this year. It is designed to support local health departments in the early detection and investigation of individual cases and local clusters of communicable diseases, while simultaneously meeting the state and federal needs of outbreak control, disease surveillance and epidemiologic research.

One thing to note further down in the press release: the project uses JRuby. We talked to Mike Herrick, Program Manager at the Collaborative Software Initiative, to talk about the experience of using JRuby for the project.

CSI Public Health Open Source Project Annouced

I'm pretty proud to be involved in this project.

How often do you get to say this about the impact of your project?

When deployed, UT-NEDSS project will directly contribute to the prevention of sickness and death by effectively collecting, identifying, tracking and trending information gathered about infectious diseases and bioterrorism attacks. Additionally, this unique partnership is providing lessons for public health informatics on:

• Open source software best practices
• Lean Software Development practices
• Building an open source community for a public health product
• Contractual relations between public health entities and a commercial open source software company that support long-term product sustainability

We have a great team of folks working their hearts out on this. It truly is an honor to be part of the team.

I love moments like this - those strange joyous moments of clarity where anything seems possible in software.

Groovy New Commuter Bike

I picked up a new commuter bike today to get me to work on my fairly incredible commute I used to call river walk. Its "river ride" now I suppose.

I got a 3 speed, pedal break simple old school euro bike. It's an Electra Amsterdam Classic.

I love my other bike, but it isn't practical for commuting.

Looking forward to a groovy summer on my new granny bike!