Hi all, In a message to this ML yesterday it was pointed out that there is an Open Source API for the German Online Banking standard HBCI available now. I had been looking forward to this since last summer, and eventually it seems like this API will actually be usable from within Gnucash.
A note about the point of HBCI support: Roughly half of the banks in Germany use the HBCI standard as their online banking technology, so there is quite some demand for HBCI client software. There still doesn't exist ANY open source HBCI-capable software (Linux and/or Windows) out there in Germany, and there exists exactly ONE HBCI-capable proprietary software on Linux (Moneyplex by Matrica http://www.matrica.de/prodmpxwinlnx.htm Price: EUR 59 and up). On Windows, there are a few more (of course), but they still are only a few. This means that IF we add HBCI-support in Gnucash, we would actually be the FIRST ONE to do this. Within all humility, this would probably give us press reactions up to the leading-edge computing journals ("First open source HBCI client ever available") and it might boost our user base in Germany by maybe a factor of 10. However, when I think about implementing HBCI support in Gnucash, I started to wonder what development branch of Gnucash would be suitable to do this. Of course, one would say, this is a new feature and thus it should be developed on the 1.7 branch, since this is per definition the development branch. Additionally, quite a bunch of Gnucash internals have changed now in the 1.7 branch, so the development in 1.6 and 1.7 is quite different and preferrably we should only work within one branch of the two. On the other hand, the time frame of implementing HBCI support *and* getting enough users to test it would be to do that during the next ~3-4 months. AND once the HBCI support has reached a beta stage, I would definitely want to make a *new stable release* with precisely the HBCI support added (and giving us the press etc. echo mentioned above). So I would like to ask the whole community: * What do you think about the maturity of the 1.7 branch? * What would need to be done before 1.7 reaches a beta-stable stage? This doesn't necessarily mean that all of the new user-visible features currently in 1.7 need to be stable and/or complete; we could very well postpone the completion of some of the user-visible features to a later point in time. But for the HBCI feature, we would need to have the internal new features of Gnucash to be definitely stabilized. * What would be needed to make a new stable release from the 1.7 branch within the next 4-6 months? Cheers, Christian Stimming _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
