Features of typical MOTECH-based applications include:
- distributing information to patients via voice or SMS
- collecting data from patients or care providers
- alerting care providers of the status of their patients
- facilitating communication between patients, care providers, and/or health administrators
Notable deployments include the Mobile Midwife program in Ghana, which provides pregnant women and their families vital information about how to have healthy pregnancies, and the Ananya project in Bihar, India, which aims to improve outcomes in maternal/child health as well as TB treatment adherence.
This is our first summer participating in Google Summer of Code and we couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this fantastic program! We were fortunate to accept two very promising students to join our team: Tuan Trang and Mimansha Bhargav. Tuan will be working on a project to get MOTECH running in the cloud, using Google Compute Engine and Docker containers. His efforts will provide a much easier deployment and hosting path for our partner organizations who don't employ full-time technical operational staff (i.e. most of them). Mimansha will be improving our integration with CommCareHQ, an important data collection and health worker administration system used widely for health projects. With the completion of his project, MOTECH will support multiple versions of CommCare forms, be able to connect to multiple CommCare servers/domains, and provide a graphical interface for building MOTECH workflows based on specific form/case fields.
We are thrilled to have Tuan and Mimansha on board and excited for what the summer will bring!
By Lauren Lavoie, Organization Administrator for MOTECH
Checkstyle is a development tool that helps programmers write coherent Java code that adheres to coding standards. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this sometimes boring (but very important) task. Checkstyle is ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard.
Checkstyle is highly configurable and can be made to support almost any coding standard and can check many aspects of your source code. The tool also provides checks that easily identify class design problems or detect negligence of engineering best practices.
Our projects for Google Summer of Code 2014 include:
- Updating Java ANTLR grammar to support Java 8 syntax changes.
- Adding reliable parsing support of comments and documentation comments (special format of comments that is used by JavaDoc tool) to Checkstyle's Java grammar. This will allow Checkstyle to validate comments in code and let other developers write their custom validation rules based on ready-to-use parse tree (as it is done with java code now).
- Reviewing requirements for Java code style from Google, creating a Checkstyle configuration for it, and extending the existing checks (or create new checks) to cover Google's requirements.
By Roman Ivanov, Organization Administrator for Checkstyle
