Announcing a new sub-project in gnucash: GUI in C++, Qt, CMake.

[Christian Stimming]

I'd like to explain my recent experiments with C++ and cmake: I was tired of 
the amount of code one has to write in the C language to achieve seemingly 
trivial tasks. In my day-time projects with other, more GUI-suited, 
programming languages, the simple tasks can be written sooo much simpler, 
leaving much more time for the actual challenging tasks. In gnucash, over and 
over again I thought couldn't the GUI be written in any of the more modern 
languages and/or toolkits. I mean, can we get the fun into gnucash coding 
again?

Actually, we can.

Announcing a new sub-project in gnucash: The non-GUI parts are re-used in the 
state they are, in the C language. This means the double-entry principles and 
all of the other achievments in the "engine" and xml-backend and eventually 
other backends can be re-used. But the GUI is rewritten completely new, from 
scratch, in C++ and using the Qt toolkit. Fun again. The build system is CMake 
because its configuration runs magnitudes faster. Fun again. And as a final 
bonus, for MS windows more compiler than before are supported, namely this 
whole new project can be compiled by MS Visual Studio as well. So here it is:

  Cutecash
  Free Finance Software. Easy to develop, easy to use.

Currently this is only a proof-of-concept for developers: You can load an 
existing gnucash XML file, and it will show the list of accounts as a flat 
table in a QTableView. The fun part is how easy it was to add this display of 
all accounts, so it will probably take only another 1-2 hours until the 
account list is a tree to be viewed in a QTreeView. And a QTableView with the 
splits of an account can't be far...

To give this a try, have qt4 (>=4.5.0) and cmake (>= 2.6.0) installed and:

  mkdir build-cutecash
  cd build-cutecash
  cmake ..
  make
  ./src/gnc/cutecash

Have fun (again)!

Christian