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by HillRat
1124 days ago
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Don't forget the most ridiculous part of EDI-style protocols (X12, HL7, etc.), which is that they don't have an explicit looping construct; you have to look at each implementation spec and your trading partner's specific companion guide and determine where repeated or looped sequences area through context. Makes for some exciting issues in implementing parsers. |
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On the positive side, being domain specific and well known, Hl7v2 "interface" specs are more simple and predictable than other IDLs I've used. (Just vibes. I haven't done a formal comparison.)
We had a stock human-readable "interface" template to use. It's basically literate programming. Paragraphs of descriptive text and well-formed tables.
I wrote a simple parser which turned those well-formed tables into actual code. Our HL7 tools made it trivial to subclass generated classes whenever a special case (difficult to describe in the spec's tables) had to be hard-coded.
Our HL7 tool stack allowed our "business analysts" (domain experts talking with customers) to do most of the implementation themselves, with speedy deploys, low cost of change, and super easy to verify. For instance, our team could make changes and deploy and verify while on the phone with customers / partners.
What could be easier?
Our customers loved us.
So of course the mega-corp which acquired our startup had to strangle our effort in the crib, dumping our corpse in a land fill. Mostly out of spite.