Integration with other applications?

[Drew Bernat]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Clark Jones wrote:

> I know that most may think me a heretic for this, but personally I
> prefer a group of programs that each do their work very well to a single,
> sorta-does-all, all-sorta-dancing program.  All singing, all dancing programs
> tend to be vastly larger, far slower to load, have more bugs, and present
> more security "holes" than the smaller ones.  As long as I can "cut and
> paste" between applications, that's generally sufficient for most purposes.
> 

My view on integration has always been that GUI apps should be integrated
the same way command-line apps are -- we don't have one big do-everything
application (well, except find) but you can use both pipes and
command-line arguments to patch together almost anything you want. Of
course, this is a whole lot harder to do with GUI stuff, but I don't think
it is impossible.

Gnucash, by it's design, is/should be (I'm not sure which) scriptable. I
see that in the same light as command-line flags -- starting a program to
do certain things without user input. For example, I could have a shell
script download items from my bank, massage them, and inject them into
Gnucash with a line like the following:
  gnucash --add --account <account> --item <item>
Rough draft, but it _should_ be possible.

GNOME is currently working on Bonobo, which looks to me a lot like CORBA
wrapped up and made nice. Again, overgeneralized equivalence, CORBA seems
to be a lot like command-line pipes. We could export a CORBA interface to
allow other apps to feed Gnucash data.

Did that make any sense, or should I go back to bed? :)

Drew

-- 
Drew Bernat                                                __ ____
abernat@zathras.net                                         |  | |
http://www.zathras.net                                         | |