[Kde-finance-apps] Some interesting news from the GnuCash project

[Thomas Baumgart]

On Friday 05 March 2010 14:57:12 Alvaro Soliverez wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Thomas Baumgart <thb at net-bembel.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I wanted to direct your attention to this interesting message:
> >
> >  http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2010-March/027700.html
> >
> > I already contacted the author (who I know personally) and he told him
> > about our work and meeting. He sounded interested as well.  Let's see if
> > we can work something out.
>
> Thomas,
> You are subscribed to the GNC mailing list. What was the reaction to a
> Qt interface? After all, it's only a step away from being a KDE
> application and I don't know how purist they are about that.

Well, one dev (also German down in Nürnberg) tries to compile it and stumbles 
over problems with some headers. From what I read, this still seems to 
require some guile, so I don't know how much of GNOME is required to get all 
this working.

Here are some more reactions:

1)

I'd had similar thoughts.  The engine and core can be in C and wrapped,
but the app itself can be in another language (c++, python, even java).
I would have aimed at 2.6 (and I suppose that is what you would aim at
as well).

2)
Well, I'm a C++ booster, so I'm in favor. But for the long term, why keep the 
core and engine in C? Letting the C++ genie out of the bottle means that we 
can over time redesign and rewrite the non-gui code as well. (Have you looked 
at Phil's roll-his-own vtable implementation in backend? He could have done 
it in a tenth the code and probably a hundredth of the time in C++. It would 
be faster, too, because the compiler would make optimized vtables in machine 
code.)

While I would have preferred Wx to Qt, either is a big improvement over 
Gtk+/Gnome for platform-independence, so another +1.
Qt does have the advantage that the aqbanking interface is already in Qt, so 
we need only one toolkit. (Do note that there is a C++ interface to Gtk+ 
called Gtkmm.)

3)
Long time a go, I told about to create a library using the GnuCash's
engine. This library could be based on GObject, be GObject
Introspectable (live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection), for bindings
friendly, and reused for any language and toolkits.

This library could use the Database backend, to allow multiple
concurrent access (one for a main application, one for an applet, and
other clients), using GnuCash's engine to query, insert and update
data.

This could be archived, step by step:
1) Create a GObject wrapper objects library, to use GnuCash's engine quickly
2) Move code slowly from the actual engine to the GObject library
3) Deprecate code from the engine, in order to use the GObject library



That's for it right now.
 
-- 

Regards

Thomas Baumgart

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