ICW - Technology for Health

Rapid Prototyping with Grails at ICW

New business opportunities with our partners  in the healthcare market have to be addressed quickly with a prototype to present a proof of concept to clients and investors. In contrast to other Research and Development units EHU is free to choose the most appropriate means available to develop a working prototype.

Challenge

Currently there is a significant change going on with regard to how drugs are distributed in the health care sector. Pharmacists are setting up industrial solutions for medication repackaging. Patients, often chronically ill and taking between 6-7 different pills a day, will receive a complete set of tablets called a "blister pack" with all their pills already chronologically arranged in the order they need to be taken. Medication errors are therefore reduced significantly. For the production of blister packs providers depend heavilyon information from the medical world ? that is to say, the physician's prescription.

To take part in the fast growing field of blister packaging solutions ICW's partners needed a fast approach for building a solid prototype. Speed was a critical factor, because there is significant competition in this emerging market.

Solution

While the main ICW development environment is JEE with a customized Eclipse IDE the EHU decided to use Grails for an even more rapid and flexible development process. Grails is an advanced and innovative Web application framework based on Groovy, and built on proven open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh. Groovy is a dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that offers a flexible Java-like syntax that developers can learn in a matter of hours.

"One of the great advantages is the re-use of known technologies in Grails. We know that we can trust technologies like Spring and Hibernate which gives us the reliability that we need for a working prototype", says Philipp Karbach, product manager of the EHU prototype.

ICW sets standards for high secure web-applications, that is why even the prototype had to reach the high security goals. This is where EHU highly benefits from the plug-ins available from the rich Grails community. For example, EHU could easily reuse the functionality of Acegi for authentication and access rights.

Benefits

Rapid Project Ramp Up

Grails makes it easier and saves time bringing new developers onto a project, because it provides a simpler, clearer, more intuitive development workflow and process. Someone with no Java or Grails experience can learn Grails quickly, get up to speed in a matter of days and become very productive. Grails can be useful for both the novice developer, who is new to any kind of web development, and the seasoned Java developer.

Grails is simpler than other development options, requiring significantly less code, which makes it easier for developers to understand exactly what the code is trying to achieve. This simplicity has enabled EHU to streamline a process that previously involved redundant work between back-end and front-end developers.

Fast Project Delivery

Grails made it very easy to develop a working prototype for our partners quickly, because some basic functionality is already provided through Grails scaffolding and persistence features, and there is significantly less code to write. In fact, the first running application was build in just a couple of days.

Streamlined Maintenance and Support

From a maintenance perspective, Grails simplifies debugging and reduces debugging time. Grails applications typically require less code, which makes supporting and fixing the application much easier, and requires substantially less time. For example, it is much simpler to find solutions to a problem or support an application when we only have to go through one or two files with 50 lines of code, instead of searching through 300 lines of code in 18 different files.

What's next?

EHU has successfully developed a working prototype for the blister pack solution named ICW OptiMed and is planning the near term future of this software right now. There are more challenging novelties emerging in the healthcare sector. Personalized medicine is on the rise and together with other partners EHU will develop a new prototype addressing its special needs regarding technology and processes.

Resources

• Springsource Case Study
• Institut für Informationstechnologien im Gesundheitswesen
• Akquinet AG

Philipp Karbach is a product manager for EHU at InterComponentWare AG. His focus is on evaluating the business case before a prototype is built for an innovative healthcare solution.