I'd like to create an applet for gnucash

[Martin Kaffanke]

Hi Christian!


> First of all, you need to keep in mind that gnucash works only on a  
> single data file as storage mechanism. So if an applet would like to  
> do something with that data file (either retrieve information or  
> adding new transactions), the data file cannot be used by another  
> full-blown gnucash process at the same time, and vice versa.

Ok, this is understandable.  But hum, this is not the first time I fell
over gnucash mechanism, for me gnucash seems to be a hard thing, because
it really matches to many things I like but extending gnucash is for me
always a hard part, I never sended a patch to you because I never found
my patches really well working.

The design of gnucash makes me not to extend gnucash.  For that what you
tell me here I would suggest to have a gnucash-data-server like
evolution has.  This would be great but I think an implementation is not
that easy, we need a protocol to connect a gnucash instance to the
data-server, and this is not a part for me I think.  It would be really
great to have such a thing and some specification how we could use this
from anywhere, maybe also over an ssh connection or something.

> With this constraint, an applet could basically act as a 
> "mini-gnucash", i.e. it offers only a very small subset of the gnucash  
> features, but loads and saves the data file just as the normal gnucash  
> does. 

Your suggestions are really good.  But I'm not sure if I really like it
that way.  There must be also a way to make the applet just bring the
gnucash window into the front if the user wants to insert any
transaction.  This should be possible, but if the applet runns the user
will always get an 'file already open' message on starting gnucash
itself.

> I think writing something like that is still non-trivial, but is  
> probably manageable.  

I thought this would be easyer just done by any c# or python gtk app,
because on C I always run into so many troubles. :(


> > Where can I start?  Would this be easy on the gnucash side.
> 
> If you start from the gnc-main-window and simply remove all unneeded  
> functionality it is probably rather easy. We'd even be happy to  
> include this as an additional subproject into our SVN repository once  
> you got some usable code.
> 
> However, I'm not sure whether this is what you want.

What do you think about splitting gnucash into an frontend and a backend
(data-server)?

I suggest you would find it nice, but there aren't any people which have
time for that. :(

Thanks,
Martin
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