GnuCash & HBCI ?

[Christian Stimming]

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Up to this message all HBCI-related emails have been written in German. The 
really significant API discussion has yet to come (in other words: is just 
starting), so there's not much point in translating the previous messages. 
However, I would like to kindly ask all Germans to write their answers to 
this topic in english.

On Friday 10 August 2001 16:00, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> aber ich konzipiere derzeit eine abstrakte banking-api, fuer die es dann
> auch u.a. ein hbci-backend geben soll ... (aber auch diverse
> webapplet-protokolle)

Translation:
> I am working on an abstract API for online banking. It should be able to 
> have different backends: HBCI among others, but also various web-based 
> protocols...

Thinking about it more, I would not only think that this requires more work 
than necessary, but also it just doesn't work. If I understand you correctly, 
you would like to find one single API for all sorts of different online 
services. By the term "API", I mean some GUI-independent set of interfaces -- 
do you mean that as well?

Because if I think about different online banking services then it'll 
immediately become clear that different online banking backends will need 
different GUI frontends as well. Think of passphrase (HBCI) vs. TAN (web), 
secret key floppy disk (HBCI) vs. PIN (web) vs. RSA chip card (HBCI) etc., 
not to mention the different country-specific types of transactions.

That's why I think that an abstract online banking interface is only of 
limited use. The GUI frontend will *always* need to know which sort of online 
service is being used. There might be some benefit from generalizing the data 
structures (e.g. by having an abstract base class). But for the actual 
implementation I'm fully "satisfied" if we can get a HBCI-specific API to 
work.

Christian
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