Project Goals

[Gerhardus Geldenhuis]

Hi
I am new to the list so please excuse if I am bringing up a recently
discussed issue/issues.

I have read through the project goals and was greatly exited about the
posibilities/ideas for the future and also what has already been achieved. I
would like to share some ideas with you.

Firstly in terms of SQL I/O. I have worked extensively with Firebird which
is the opensource version of interbase developed by borland. Firebird meets
all your requirements I could acertain after reading the Project
Goals(projects.html)Firebird is fully transactional supporting
commit,rollback,commit retaining it also supports different isolation levels
and a lot of other advance feautures. One of the concerns mentioned was data
corruption because of direct data accessing. This can be elliminated by
using stored procedures in the database to add/remove data ensuring data
entegrity. The other concern was that formats might change due to
upgrades/new features. This bring me to another point considering CORBA
which is also mentioned in the document. By creating standard corba objects
that interact with the data you create the ability to access this data
crossplatform and language independant. Further you saveguard against data
corruption because everybody uses the corba object to interface. Thirdly you
dont have the problem of data formats changing. This is elimated by creating
a well planned object structure(corba objects is inheritable/polymorphism
etc)this means that when new features are added you just inherit the old
object and add new functionality. Because the object interface stays the
same you the developer dont care what the object does behind the scenes
solong as it returns the same result wheter it got the info from a
db,flatfile or the web.

Firebird has very low admin requirements and I am sure there is enough
knowledge to write a script that smoothly installs the database.

The document also mentioned the posiblity of creating a web application
server. This I think is a very good idea but it should not be the only way
to gain access to the financial engine. Again CORBA would be a good solution
here because of the integrated support java has for corba. I know java is
not popular for browsers but that is another discussion.

Lastly it is my dream to create a fully fledged mrp/erp system that is the
equivalent of sap only opensource. Such a system should be build out of
corba objects that is created according to apics standard and with such a
system gnucash could integrate well if it was based on a corba structure.
With this in mind Order Entry and Job Costing becomes two seperate modules
totally remove from what wants to be achieve in gnucash.

I these ideas are worth discussing and if it has been (to death) at least
consider/evalute firebird as a posible solution if you as developers would
decide to go that route.

Groete
Gerhardus