Web interface for gnuCash

[Conrad Canterford]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 15:36 +0200, Graham Leggett wrote:
> > You cannot fault them for rejecting any suggestion that they should
> > devote the next several years worth of their precious development time
> > to your suggestion instead of working on issues and features which are
> > affecting them or which they believe are important.
> Several years? All I suggested was that Gnucash would be more useful if it
> could export data in an easier fashion, and if this export could be done
> from the command line. Given these two relatively simple features, info
> could be automatically published to a webserver by cron, no need for any
> sledgehammer web application solutions.

Hmmm. Well, that was certainly not my understanding of what was being
suggested. I realise I don't always pay as much attention here as I
ought to, but Derek's suggestion that you consider SQL Ledger implies to
me that he also believed you were suggesting a full-on web app. Just
regularly producing html reports and cron jobbing them into a spot in
your apache htdocs tree is a more achievable goal - but still
non-trivial.

Separating the gui from the rest of the app so that it can be used as a
command-line tool has certainly been discussed before (including, if I
remember correctly, sometime very recently, possibly with yourself). It
is non-trivial, if I managed to read all of the discussion.

If the core developers are lacking enthusiasm for such an undertaking,
that could at least partly be explained by the fact that one of the core
devs is going to have to spend probably a significant amount of time
explaining how things work in detail, helping solve problems, and
checking patches that are submitted. If it is the large and complex task
that I suspect it is, then I can understand that they might dislike the
imposition on their time, especially if they feel that there is a good
chance, as has happened many times before, that the interest will
evaporate once the enormity of the task becomes apparent (I'm not saying
that is the case, I haven't spoken to any of them about this).

As a personal aside, I would love to be able to import QIF data into
gnucash as a command line app. If you can solve the issues for reports,
that is another extension for the interface. Sorry, but I never really
had the in depth understanding of how it all hangs together to be able
to provide that help. Since I haven't touched gnucash code in probably 3
years or more, I certainly will not be any help now.

Conrad
(who really should go to bed and not get into these sorts of
conversations)