IPF 1.7.0 released

I'm pleased to announce the release of IPF 1.7.0. The main focus of this release was support for clinical standards, in particular the IHE profiles XDS.a, XDS.b, PIX, PDQ and support for the clinical document architecture (CDA) and the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) content profile. The release notes are here.

With IPF's IHE support, IHE actor interfaces can be implemented in IPF routes via URIs. This is as simple as using other Camel or IPF components such as the HTTP or JMS components. The URIs denote individual transactions (ITI) in IHE profiles. For example

from('xds-iti18:myIti18Service')
...

implements the 'XDS Registry Stored Query' service interface of an XDS document registry and can be used from any XDS ITI18-compliant consumer. Such a consumer can also be implemented using the same IPF xds-iti18 component on client side e.g.

...
.to('xds-iti18://somehost:8080/myWebApp/services/myIti18Service')


All the low-level details like communicating with ebXML messages over SOAP etc. is handled by that component. IPF routes deal with easy-to-use object representations of messages exchanged within IHE transactions. The full list of supported transactions is given in the IHE quick reference.

With IPF's CDA and CCD support clinical documents can be created, parsed, rendered and queried/analyzed using a domain-specific language (DSL). This DSL hides away most of the technical details you usually encounter when dealing with the complex XML-representation of clinical documents. In addition to these content-DSL extensions, IPF also provides some route DSL extension for parsing, validating and marshalling CDA documents in IPF routes.

Here's an excerpt of new IPF 1.7.0 features added since 1.6.0

* IHE support
** IHE XDS.a+b transactions (ITI 14-18, 41-43)
** IHE PIX transactions (ITI 8-10)
** IHE PDQ transactions (ITI 21-22)
** IHE ATNA for all the above transactions
* CDA support
** Generic CDA support
** CCD profile support
* Advanced XML processing
** Caching XSLT transmogrifier
** Schematron validator
* Detailed XDS tutorial
* Performance measurement support
* Scheduled flow management database cleanup
* ...

IPF 1.7.0 is based on Camel 1.6. In parallel, a Camel 2.0-based version is developed on the IPF 2.0 branch. The current development snapshot is feature-equivalent with IPF 1.7.0 but runs on Camel 2.0. The next IPF 2.0 milestone 2 release will follow within the next one or two weeks. I recommend you to use the 2.0 milestone releases unless you upgrade from an older IPF 1.x release. After releasing IPF 2.0.0, work on IPF 1.x will go into maintainance mode (but we leave it open whether to backport selected IPF 2.x features).

Exciting new features in IPF 2.0 which didn't make it into IPF 1.7 are Eclipse-based IPF development tools and improvements to IPF's OSGi support. These features are developed and documented in a separate IPF Tools project. The Eclipse-based IPF management client has been moved to this project as well. I'll give a more detailed IPF 2.0 overview in a separate post.

Many thanks to the whole development team and contributors for their excellent and high-quality work!