Moving towards IPF 1.7

Work on the next IPF release is in progress and focuses on

• Components for implementing IHE actor interfaces (XDS.a, XDS.b, PIX, PDQ). Implementing IHE actor interfaces will be as simple as using other Camel components for communication (e.g. the HTTP component). IPF IHE components represent transactions in IHE profiles. For example, to create a web service for the server-side of the ITI-41 transaction (provide and register document set) from the XDS.b profile just write from('xdsb-iti41:service1') in your route definition. xdsb-iti41 is the name of the component, service1 the endpoint name. The rest of the route has to deal with connecting to (proprietary) backend systems that implement the corresponding actor functionality (document registry/repository). For more detailed information refer to this article (section Outlook).

• DSL (Groovy builder) for creating CDA documents. This DSL supports the creation of structurally correct CDA documents by enforcing CDA-relevant schema definitions but without dealing with low-level XML details. See also outlook on IPF's CDA support.

• Extension of OSGi support. Not all features of IPF have been fully OSGi-enabled with release 1.6, like the large binary support or the event infrastructure. This will be fixed with IPF 1.7. You'll also be able to use the new IHE components on OSGi platforms. We also plan to extend existing Camel components to make use of standard OSGi services such as the HTTP service.

• Better IDE (Eclipse) integration, especially for developing IPF OSGi applications. This includes application development and packaging with Eclipse PDE tools and providing an Eclipse update site for downloading the IPF runtime. Code completion for DSL extensions is currently under discussion.

• Performance testing framework. DSL extensions to performance-measure IPF applications including calculation and reporting of message processing statistics during load tests.

In parallel we will also create a SVN branch for experimenting with Camel 2.0 milestone releases. I'll let you know about our upgrade/migration experiences in a separate blog post.