Overview

Author:Neil Wallace neil@openmolar.com

Dental Practices rely heavily on database technologies to maintain valuable and sensitive data. Dental Practices also need to apply common business tools such as double entry book-keeping, invoicing, scheduling and stock management.

Openmolar aims to provide a one-stop solution for these requirements, with a plugin architecture to allow further customisation.

History

The application came to be when a UK Dentist, Neil Wallace, found himself disastisfied with both the software and service provided by a well-established UK supplier. With limited previous programming experience, but enough to realise that open source tools would need to form the backbone of his code, he learned python, qt (the toolkit used by well known applications such as “google earth” and “skype”), and became familiar with the mysql and postgres databases.

The 1st rendition of the application was constructed in haste, as a frontend to the schema provided by the forementioned commercial provider, however it very soon became clear that this schema was not optimal. This solution did, however, provide a very stable and customised application for his dental practice, which served well for 2 years.

In 2011, a complete re-write of openmolar was undertaken, with a completely redesigned schema utilising the more standards compliant Postgresql database.

These documents relate solely to that version.