On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 09:34:56PM -0500, Jody Goldberg was heard to remark: > Neither is terribly hard, but I generally avoid implementing things > until there is a clear reason to bother.
We at gnucash.org have other fish to fry for the next 3-9 months, but at some point, the gnucash reporting system needs to be redesigned to make it a lot easier to modify the visual layout of a report. Using abi to do this is an obvious path (the other being to use the edit capabilities of gtkhtml3). I've got a way of hooking data sources to data sinks already (this is what dwi does) so that is less of a concern. As to why anyone would hook up a word processor to a spreadsheet ... in the good old bad days, people automated entire assembly line production schedules in this way. Line personel typed in daily totals, and managemment got nice-looking reports that sliced & diced the data in various ways. Amazing what you could do before java and the web, huh? Which leads my thoughts off to a curious tangent: with a few extra hacks, you could do such a thing today. The "power user" aka assistant production manager (or sales manager, for a store) would be designing the spreadsheets and reports using a nice desktop GUI. But then add hooks so that the resulting spreadsheet could accept data from an apache web server, and so that the reports could be published to the same. There would need to be an apache mod_gnumeric.o to crunch the data and a mod_abiword.o to dynamically generate the required web pages. Done right, this allows complex "web applications" to be developed by "power users" without writing a single line of perl/vb/python/java. The developer gets the nice gnumeric/abiword GUI to work with. The users get the distributed multi-user web interfaces that everyone wants. Hmm. I smell something really useful here ... --linas -- pub 1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984 3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933 _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
