Moving Towards an Amazing Future for OpenMRS

At OMRS18, How might we…? sparked incredible ideas for taking OpenMRS into the future, with a few people continuing the discussion into the new year. By March, a Talk post about the amazing future for OpenMRS shared the vision of a common modular application framework that could be used by different implementations, much in the same way that the current OpenMRS Platform is used. From there, a small group started looking at potential solutions – and their explorations yielded some exciting results! In late April, OpenMRS invited Joel Denning of single-spa to share his proposal for a microfrontend solution that could allow implementations to combine bespoke or Bahmni front ends with modules used by another implementation in another country. This solution aims to address the growing challenge faced by implementations independently pursuing their own frontend solution using different technologies.

Where do we go from here?  At OpenMRS, our commitment is to have a more modern, flexible, scalable, and sustainable application framework that OpenMRS implementations using any of our current distributions can adopt following a well-tested and readily accessible migration path. Our OpenMRS working group, the Microfrontend Squad, will be working out the technical approach and considerations for an implementation migration pathway. With members bringing experience from across five distributions, including the Ref App and Bahmni, our Microfrontend Squad is currently evaluating the ability of the new framework to leverage the good work from distributions that has already been proven, identifying and testing solutions for existing apps and modules to plug-into the framework, and building an initial prototype for demonstration and community testing. As we are closer to having that initial prototype ready, we’ll set up a time for show and tell.

In the meantime, to find out more or to follow the conversation on Talk, Github, or on our #microfrontends Slack channel. All are welcome to join us!