Reporting system

[Tim M]

Hi,

As you know I have done a little work on the reporting system to try to get
some form of standards-compliance working.  I have been looking through
previous mails back to January to see what other activity there has been on
the reporting system, and found some work being done to use jqplot for
graphs.

However, it looks like the jqplot patch hasn't yet been fully applied to
trunk, so I am still seeing the old graphs.  Is this going to be fully
applied to trunk at some point?  Are there more changes expected so it
hasn't been applied yet?

Also, I am finding that the scheme is proving somewhat difficult to sift
through to locate and/or fix some of the non-compliance issues that
currently exist. It seems like it would be very helpful to get rid of scheme
and replace it with something that most people (developers) can read and
understand easily, and also rewritten to make new reports much easier to
create.  Based on what I've read in the mailing list history it sounds like
scheme is desired to be removed anyways, but I am wondering if there is any
consensus on what it should be replaced by?  I may or may not be capable of
doing this, I will have to try and see but I am finding that additional work
on standards compliance will pretty much mean replacing the scheme code.
Fixing the scheme would be possible of course, but it doesn't seem
worthwhile if it will be a lot of work and then replaced by something else
anyways.  Given the drastic need of an overhaul for the reporting system
(IMO), it seems reasonable to just blow it up and start working on a new and
improved reporting system.


I am wondering if this should also be part of the larger discussion I have
seen going on regarding moving Gnucash in general perhaps to another
language such as Java (or redoing it in Objective C).  Basically I just want
to know in advance if I am going to do any work on the reporting system,
what should I use to rewrite the code?  I am becoming very comfortable with
ruby but that would require another dependency I suppose (i saw someone
mention it so I thought i'd throw it out there).  I have experience with a
swath of scripting languages and limited Java and C++ experience.  So I am
OK with needing to get more familiar with something such as Python, C, or
Java to do the work, but I don't want to get knee deep in a major feature
patch to find out something else is preferred.

Thanks,
-Tim