Mirth Connect development environment

So, you came to the point where Mirth no longer cover all your needs, and you are ready to build your own custom connector. I'll show you how you can get a working development environment for Mirth Connect up in a matter of minutes. Note that I will not be using Eclipse for any of my tutorials, but rather I will be using Intellij for the most parts. I believe most professional programmers would too. The only exception is the part where we do Swing forms, where it was easiest to simply download Netbeans to do that work.

Mirth Connect custom connectors

Mirth Connect ("mirth" for short) is a great integration engine for healthcare applications. OSS and free for most usage, but also provide commercial support for customer that so wishes. Mirth ship with a lot of connectors that implement various common healthcare connectivity standards. At work we use HL7/MLLP as well as ASTM/TCP to integrate AQURE with many different HIS and LIS systems.

Another great thing about Mirth is the ability to develop your own connectors when Mirth doesn't provide one. So far we have implemented two types of connectors to cover our needs, a secure web-service connector, and a ASTM connector to cover some low-level protocol issues. However, no matter how flexible Mirth may be, custom development is a nightmare and very ill-suited for 3'rd party developers. There is basically no documentation, the ant build files are a mess, and the extension-points are completely undocumented. The developers of Mirth has promised documentation all the way back from 2006-2007 but so far the have completely failed to deliver. So i finally decided that I'll write a couple of blog-articles on how you can build a custom Mirth connector yourself in a few easy steps.

The blogs will cover the following topics

• Mirth Connect development environment
• Hello world Mirth custom connector
• Code a Mirth custom sender
• Code a Mirth custom listener
• Template for custom connectors

Stay tuned..

Back!

I created this blogger account already back in 2002. I've written lots of blog-posts that never got it to publishing. Never been a priority. So, now I decided that I want to give it another chance and will try to use it for a lot of stuff related to work. I simply need a channel to broadcast information that I feel could be of interest to others working with me.

The name of this blog is from my time as a student. I was nicked "gurun" by the sysadmins of the university, and I've kept that nick online ever sine.

So, going forward I'll try to commit to at least one post a month, but hopefully I'll write more than that.

Looking forward to sharing and receiving comments from ya all!

Cheers