MUMPS-in-a-box, anyone?

Hailstorm VDE for VirtualBox

Ready-to-use CFMumps development environment

Hailstorm VDE is a pre-configured CFMumps development environment, including everything you need to get started. The blazing-fast Railo CFML engine is paired with the powerful and flexible FIS GT.M. Also bundled is the latest WorldVistA EHR, pre-configured and ready to use, as well as Eclipse Luna with the CFEclipse plugin, AxioM for MUMPS coding in the vim editor, and LorikeeM for MUMPS coding in the Emacs editor.

Development tools, anyone?

We don't pick sides when it comes to the perennial vi vs. Emacs debate, but whichever editor you choose, you will be ready to code within minutes of setting up Hailstorm VDE. MUMPS development in vi is given a huge boost with David Wicksell's excellent AxioM plugin, while Emacs plays host to our very own LorikeeM. Both provide syntax highlighting, global lookup, routine navigation, and a host of other features.

We also include Eclipse Luna with the CFEclipse plugin as a more modern, GUI-based IDE environment.

Setup

Downloading Hailstorm VDE

Please use the "Download" link at the left. Note that Hailstorm VDE is about a 3.1GB download, so it will take awhile.

Extracting Hailstorm VDE

You will need Oracle VM VirtualBox to use Hailstorm VDE. You will also need a utility for uncompressing 7-Zip images; either 7-Zip for Windows, 7zx for Mac OS X, or the 7z utility for Linux (available for Ubuntu and Debian via the "7z" command).

You will need to extract the file hailstorm.7z that you downloaded. It will extract into a file called hailstorm.vmdk, which is a VirtualBox disk image file.

The uncompressed Hailstorm VDE disk image is about 12GB.

Setting Up Hailstorm VDE in VirtualBox

1. Create a new Virtual Machine, called "Hailstorm"
2. Operating system type is "Debian (64-bit)"
3. You will need to allocate at least 1024MB of RAM for the new VM
4. When asked whether to create a new disk or use an existing disk, choose the existing disk option and browse to the hailstorm.vmdk file you extracted from the downloaded hailstorm.7z
5. Start the machine. Hailstorm VDE will boot.

Now that Hailstorm VDE is installed, the following usage instructions apply:

Usage

You will be presented with a GNOME login dialog. The username is "cfmumps", and the password is "hailstorm".

Once you are logged in, you have access to the Iceweasel web browser (Applications/Internet/Iceweasel), which has in its bookmarks toolbar a number of links useful and relevant for CFMumps development.

GT.M Prompt

A GT.M interactive prompt is available via the following steps:

1. Open a command-line terminal (Applications/Accessories/Terminal)
2. Type the command "mumps -dir" (without the quotes)

WorldVistA EHR Access

At this point, you have access to WorldVistA through the normal entry points. The access code is worldvista8 and the verify code is banana1!# and the DUZ is 80. This user has full programmer-mode access to all parts of VistA (XUPROGMODE).

Building Your Applications

New CFMumps applications can be built in subfolders you create beneath /home/cfmumps/cfmumps. For example, if you had an application called helloWorld, you would create a folder for it located at the path /home/cfmumps/cfmumps/helloWorld. You can then place your cfm, cfc, js, and css files within that folder, or a subfolder contained therein.

To access your application for testing and debugging, open Iceweasel (Applications/Internet/Iceweasel), and type its URL in the location bar. If your app is contained in /home/cfmumps/cfmumps/helloWorld, the URL would be http://hailstorm.cfmumps.dev/helloWorld. Note that the part of the aforementioned URL following http://hailstorm.cfmumps.dev/ corresponds directly to the folder structure contained beneath /home/cfmumps/cfmumps, each subfolder delineated by a forward slash (/). Your helloWorld directory should contain a file called default.cfm, which is the ColdFusion equivalent of the index.html file to which you may already be accustomed.

Summary

Getting Support

CFMumps Documentation

Comprehensive reference documentation for CFMumps is available at the CFMumps Wiki.

Community support is available in the CFMumps Community forum.

A tutorial is available on the CFMumps Blog. More installations of this tutorial will be forthcoming in the following weeks.

References for the ColdFusion language are available at the following links:

• ColdFusion CFML Reference
• Developing ColdFusion Applications
• Railo Documentation

Finally, catch us on the FreeNode IRC network in the #cfmumps channel.