gnome2, Direct Connect OFX

[Conrad Canterford]

On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 12:03, TomF wrote:
> I would like to work on porting gnucash to gnome2, and would like to
> know if anyone else is planning to work on it.

Probably a good slab of the devel team unless they can get out of it
somehow...  :-)

Something I'd like to see happen as part of the "port" process (I
believe we discussed this on #gnucash some time ago) is a clear
separation of the front-end from the engine/back-end.
There are a few reasons for this:
1. I have had some discussions with people regarding the implementation
of gnucash into business sites (with a paid support agreement), and a
part of what is wanted is an ability to have site-specific user
interface elements. While some form of configurable plug-in interface
would be nice, an ability to just switch one interface with another
would be a big step in the right direction, and probably much easier to
do ("steal generic interface and modify as required"). Having it
separate means I don't have so many worries keeping a locally mangled
source tree in sync with the main source. It also then raises the
possibility of making user interfaces to cater for different levels of
user need - a "cheque-book like" interface for the basic user, current
style interface for the more advanced, etc.
2. This approach would (for similar reasons) make the envisaged KDE
front-end a more palatable task.
3. Such a step is really necessary if we are to have true
multi-user/multi-host capabilities, which is something else that the
business sites are really keen on. The front-end needs to be able to run
on a physically separate machine from the engine (not by default, but we
need to be able to do so).


> The other project I am interested in is implementing Direct Connect
> support for downloading transactions in OFX format into gnucash by
> sending messages to a server.

Tom, I don't mean to put you off, but there are some major hurdles in
achieving this, mostly called "Banks". Benoit has already indicated an
intention to make such things possible within libofx, but the problem is
that we have no way of using the magic URL that M$-Money and Quicken use
to get the download URL for each bank. Look back through the archives of
this list for a very detailed discussion on this.

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford  (conrad at mail.watersprite.com.au)
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