Automating gnucash

[Anthony]

Hi, I'm a gnucash newbie so I apologize in advance if I'm asking some
obvious questions.  I've tried to answer them through searches of the
online information first.

What I'm trying to find out is how hard it would be to set up scripts
that can interact with GnuCash.  Using something lightweight like perl
or php would be my preference.  I know C, but it's not as well geared
to the type of data manipulation I'm interested in.

My understanding is that this sort of thing is not very well
supported.  I can put the data into QIFs and import/export/merge that
way, I can hook up gnucash up to a postgres database (which is
nonstandard and doesn't work with all the features), or I can dive in
directly using the Engine API (which is partly broken and doesn't
contain much documentation).  Is this basically correct, or am I
missing something?

In the past I've used SQL Ledger to handle my personal finances.  This
makes things very easy to automate, and I set up quite a few scripts
which scrape data off the web to enter into bank reconciliations and
the like, but the GUI interface is lacking and the featureset is
sparse.  The latter actually isn't so much of a problem, because it's
easy enough to write scripts to implement the features yourself, but a
GUI programmer I am not so I don't really see this as a long term
path.  What I'd love is to be able to access my SQL Ledger database
through the Gnucash GUI, not that this is literally the goal.

I've also come across Quasar Accounting while doing some research on
this, but I haven't yet had a chance to try it out.  As it is GPL I
have my hopes up, but as I haven't heard much about it I assume there
must be something wrong with it.

Assuming there currently is no easy way to say integrate Gnucash with
a perl or php script, does anyone think this is something coming in
the foreseeable future?

Thanks to anyone who responds, and my apologies again for the newbie questions.

Anthony