GNUCash and the world

Gary Bickford garyb@fxt.com
Tue, 25 Jul 2000 09:59:57 -0700


Folks,
I was just at the O'Reilly Open Source conference, and a few things going on
there might be of interest to the GNUCash gang.  (There was non Gnome Birds of a
Feather session, which would have been nice.  Perhaps next year.)  None of these
are likely to be useful in the immediate sense but may point in good directions,
so I thought you all might want to know about them.  (I know most of you already
do. :O)  So consider this as a couple of wild ideas from the conference.

Message-oriented data transfer protocols that may be useful in data sharing.
    1.    BXXP, a 'framework for building new protocols' http://www.bxxp.org
    2.    Jabber (http://www.jabber.org) is being used already for more than just
instant messaging, by several groups.

These initiatives seemed somewhat interesting to GNUCash's future plans for
database backend.
    1.    GNUMed which is a complete medical office package including patient
records etc. is very well along, with a very robust backend database
architecture.  The folks working on it are nearly all doctors with IT degrees or
backgrounds.  It's designed for international use.  Right now they've moved from
PostgreSQL to Interbase, which is open source but not free, I think.  However it
may be interesting/useful to have some kind of integration, or adopt part of
their schema for instance, or (if they don't have the accounting part done)
consider some kind of cooperative effort.
    2.    Some folks have started OpenSourceERP.org, with the proposed product
named "Sajix".  They have the overall architecture well laid out, but I don't
think much if any code has been written yet.  Again, it may be useful to consider
some kind of interoperability, or possibly to support having GNUCash as the
accounting component of Sajix.  I note that the accounting section of their home
page has no links filled in yet.  This is not my area, so I don't know if this
makes sense.