GSoC 2022 with OpenMRS — Community Bonding Period

Piumal Rathnayake
2 min readJun 17, 2022

This year also, I got the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code at OpenMRS. During last year’s GSoC, I worked on a Java-based project; so this time I thought to apply for a micro frontend project. And I got selected to do the project, “Microfrontending the OCL Module and Reduce Backend Dependencies”.

As the project name says, the intention of the project is to create a new micro frontend for the existing OpenMRS OpenConceptLab Module.

Open Concept Lab Module

Open Concept Lab (OCL) Module is an administrative tool that is used by OpenMRS to manage its concept-based data model easily, with the help of OCL terminology management system.

The existing OCL Module is built as an Open Web App module targeting OpenMRS 2.x. But when it comes to OpenMRS 3.x, the OWA module is deprecated; but it is still used due to the unavailability of a micro frontend for the OCL Subscription Module.

So, throughout this summer, I will be working with OpenMRS to rebuild this module as an OMRS 3.x Admin Tool with modern micro frontend technologies.

Community Bonding Period

The first three weeks of Google Summer of Code are allocated for Community Bonding and it is used to get familiarized with the mentors, project environment and the community.

At the beginning of the community bonding period, I was able to set up the development environment of the project and learn the community best practices of OpenMRS micro frontends. Since this project is mainly based on React and Typescript, I read Road to React by Robin Wieruch to improve my React knowledge as well.

During the second week, I had the initial meeting with my primary mentor Ian Bacher and my secondary mentor Hadijah Kyampeire to discuss and finalize the project plan, timeline and further improvements. Also, we created a JIRA Epic to track the issues and progress of the project. For the project updates, I created a thread on OpenMRS Talk.

During the last few days of the community bonding period, I went through the project documentation, related repositories and updated those.

The coding period officially started on 13th of June. From this week onwards, I’ll be posting my weekly project updates on Medium and OpenMRS Talk. Thank you for reading!

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Piumal Rathnayake

I'm a Computer Engineering Undergraduate at University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. And I also work as a software engineer at Sustainable Education Foundation.