Introduction

Getting started

Prerequisites The Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) is based on Apache Camel. It is therefore important that you have a good understanding how Camel works before continuing with the IPF documentation. For a general Camel overview go the project's main page. Camel tutorials can be found on a separate tutorials page. A recommended starting point is the tutorial introducing Camel steadily in a real life integration. Application development on the Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) follows Enterprise Integration Patterns. Integration platforms or service buses won't help you unless you have a good understanding of the principles and concepts of messaging solutions. This book gives you excellent hints how to design messaging-based integration solutions.

Initial reading

After you've learned some basics about Apache Camel the best way to start with IPF is to read through the IPF overview section. It will give you a high-level view of the features provided by IPF including some links to more detailed documentation. The IPF architecture section starts with diagrams of the physical components that make up IPF. A short description of the component namspaces and the individual components is given as well.

Infrastructure setup

Before you start working with IPF make sure that you've read the IPF development pages. These will explain how to

• Setup the development environment.
• Checkout and compile the sources (optional).
• Import the IPF sources into Eclipse (optional).
• Create new projects using archetypes (see also IPF Tutorials).

First project

The first steps tutorial is a good starting point for creating your first IPF project. It demonstrates how to use IPF project archetypes for creating a project and walks through the key project artifacts. A simple message processing example will introduce some core features of IPF. You can find further tutorials on the IPF tutorials page.

IPF overview

The Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) provides interfaces for health-care related integration solutions.
An prominent example of an healthcare-related use case of IPF is the implementation of interfaces for transactions specified in IHE profiles. IPF can be easily embedded into any Java application and additionally supports deployments inside OSGi environments.
Failure recovery and high-availability features support application developers implementing non-functional requirements.

IPF is built upon and extends the Apache Camel routing and mediation engine. It has an application programming layer based on the Groovy programming language and comes with comprehensive support for message processing and connecting systems in the eHealth domain. IPF provides domain-specific languages (DSLs) for implementing Enterprise Integration Patterns in general-purpose as well as healthcare-specific integration solutions.

The following table summarizes the IPF features.

IPF code repositories

The code repository of the IPF main project is located at

• http://github.com/oehf/ipf

The code repositories of the IPF subprojects are located at

• http://github.com/oehf/ipf-tools
• http://github.com/oehf/ipf-runtime
• http://github.com/oehf/ipf-labs

IPF subprojects

Since version 2.0 of IPF several existing components as well as newly developed components have been moved to IPF subprojects. There are currently two IPF subprojects which are described in the following subsections.

IPF Tools

This project provides Eclipse-based development, administration and monitoring tools for the Open eHealth Integration Platform.

• The development tools support developers in creating, testing and packaging IPF applications within the Eclipse plugin development environment (PDE). IPF applications created with these tools can be deployed and operated on OSGi R4.1 platforms. Part of the development tools is the IPF Runtime - the OSGi edition of IPF.
• The administration and monitoring tools are Eclipse plugins for managing IPF platform and application resources. Examples are JMX-based system management clients or the IPF platform manager.

Links:

• Repository
• IPF Manager Wiki
• IPF IDE Wiki

IPF Runtime

Deprecation Beginning with IPF 2.5 we will discontinue distributing the IPF runtime. Instead, IPF provides OSGi features to be used in Apache Karaf.

• The IPF Runtime project provides an OSGi-based runtime environment for IPF applications. The IPF Runtime is an IPF distribution that is running on the Equinox OSGi platform. Find out more in the IPF Runtime Wiki.

Links:

• Repository
• IPF Runtime Wiki

IPF Lab

This project is the incubation area for the projects Open eHealth Integration Platform and Open eHealth Integration Platform Tools. Contributions of new features from the IPF community will be mainly done in this project. New features may come from existing IPF applications or are developed from scratch directly in the IPF Lab. This project also hosts components from current research activities such as integrating IPF into cloud-computing environments or into different web application frameworks.

Links:

• Repository
• IPF Labs Wiki

IPF architecture

IPF architecture in OSGi environments described elsewhere IPF's architecture in OSGi environments is described in the architecture section of the OSGi support page. It complements the information presented here.

Architecture overview

The following figure gives an overview of the IPF modules, their dependencies and their names (abbreviated package names). The modules of the ihe subpackages are shown in the next section. The last subsection describes the modules in more detail. The module names match the jar file names in the Maven repository. The IPF architecture is also closely related to the project structure in the code repository.

Architecture overview eHealth modules

The next figure shows the IPF eHealth modules. The Camel-independent modules are contained in the ipf.commons.ihe package, Camel-specific eHealth integration modules are contained in the ipf.platform-camel.ihe package. These modules can be used to implement actor interfaces of standard IHE and Continua transactions, as well for implementation of project-specific ones. For list of currently supported IHE transactions visit the eHealth support pages.

IPF and OSGi

All IPF modules have been designed to run on an OSGi R4 version 4.1 platform. The osgi package additionally containes specialized OSGi bundles such as extender bundles and configuration fragments (not shown). For a detailed description about IPF and OSGi refer to the OSGi support section.

IPF Modules