Overleg:OsFinancials Webtop Developer Guide

Kicking off the discussions as suggested in http://www.osfinancials.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&t=744&sid=9d7a3b29e0e12ecaa89182204e01a2c7

First off... would anyone object to switching this phpBB to using English instead of Dutch, as suggested for open source projects in http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4 ?

Now to more serious matters :-)

Before even thinking about the mechanics of building a resilient and high performance Rails app, I'd like to suggest we make some architectural decisions. Because of the tight coupling of the presentation and business logic layers in OSF_Desktop, I see three viable routes:

1. Rewrite all business logic in Ruby. 2. Extract business logic to a shared library, dynamically link in to ruby at runtime. 3. Extract business logic to a new "OSFserver", have Rails communicate with OSFserver via REST/SOAP WebServices.

I suggest #1 is infeasible (probably easier to do what GAL at Sourceforge are doing, start a new accounting system in Rails from scratch).

1. 2 might be feasible, but there will be plenty of technical challenges (Ruby calls C API, which calls Pascal API, results go back up the chain...).

1. 3 will require a stack of work but still looks the clear winner.Something similar was IIUC discussed on the TurboCash ML:

http://groups.google.com/group/turbocash/browse_thread/thread/7000d7d8cc12497d (and BTW I'd *much* rather be using Google Groups than phpBB for this project ;-) ) but there are any number of approaches to setting up such an architecture. A Linux Qt / GTK+ client would then be much easier to implement (since most logic would sit in the server)and it would give some future-proofing (since an XML-based app server can be used in just about any architecture).

The big downside to this is that I have no idea of the complexity of stripping the business logic of osF into a separate server process; nor of the test coverage (is there a test suite of some kind to tell us when we've broken something?)

Final thought - defining an audience might be a good first step. I don't want an ERP or POS system (PostBooks and others will do fine for this), just a small business accounting system with a rich-client UI and a web UI, that runs with a *nix server. Is that what others want too?

   - Thomas.

PS: I'm not sure how to set up edit notifications on this page, please update the forum link or email me - nichols7 at gmail dot com - if possible: thanks.

Answer: Just use the menu on top (watch/unwatch) to have a notification on changes.