Opening-up database interface.

We have developed an application, for the British health service, which is designed to handle the administration of patients through hospitals (both inpatients and outpatients).

We have a need to integrate with many 3rd party applications and would, naturally, prefer to do this through a standard publishable interface.

My question is this :-

What form should this interface take?

Some options I have thought of are :-

1. Considering that the GUI (Access) uses the database through ODBC by making use of a set of stored procedures and views - should I simply publish those procedures and views and leave it at that?
2. I could create a server process on the server machine with which 3rd parties could communicate and publish the protocol for talking to that server process. The protocol could even be a standard one if such a thing existed for the all of the scope of the applicarion. (I am aware of HL7 (doesn't handle outpatients) and some initiatives in the NHS Information Management Group (won't be delivered for at least a year).)
3. I could create API libraries to be linked into the 3rd party applications. The implementation of these libraries would have some platform specific code but otherwise could (probably) be made largely platform independent.
4. I could make our front end code be DDE aware (Yuk!).

I would appreciate any feedback that others have had in this sort of opening-up process (including other options that I have not thought of).

Chris Selwyn
Senior Consultant
Perihelion Software
email: chris_at_perihelion.co.uk
tel: +44 749 344203 Received on Fri Nov 18 1994 - 16:53:43 CET