I’m working to make PBooks more easily customizable to attract more developers to the project, and so I made a few small changes today.
If you are a software developer and are reviewing open source bookkeeping projects, would you mind providing some feedback? Feel free to comment on this or any post or better yet join the forums. This is my first time running an open source project and one of the things I was looking forward to was peer review. I would really appreciate it, thank you.
Among the changes were some basic template modifications to allow easier simple modifications, like changing the logo and adding a footer. I’m planning a full fledged API but I do need to figure out the best way to do that. Probably XML-RPC, but I’m not sure yet.
I don’t wish to sound unkind but the problem is that you are using an obscure framework and obscure methods. I’ve reviewed the code and there is little I can use because it is so left field.
Basing the whole thing around XML is not going to excite anybody - that’s Java stuff. Small operations write in real languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) and generate XML as an interchange language usually via a REST API interface. The rest is just good old code, not declarative state transformations, and tends to use straight HTML/CSS (even if that makes forms and reports a real pain to produce).
GnuCash fell into similar problems because its reports are written in Scheme/Lisp. Hardly anybody knows that, and few can do it properly.
If you want to get stuff done with volunteers, you have to consider carefully the motivation of the volunteers and what they want out of it, whether that is community or the chance to learn ‘the latest exciting thing’.
Perhaps you need to consider whether to adopt a more mainstream approach to development. That way you’ll have more people to choose from.
Hi Neil, I admit that Nexista is an obscure framework, but I really believe that XML and XSL are coming of age, with the ability of browsers to transform, and more and more frameworks and modules supporting it.
I’m not sure about the future of Nexista, but I plan to support PBooks for a long time. Whether its with Nexista, Cocoon, or Popoon, it should be easy enough to do.
I think we’ll even see a python or ruby xsl framework sooner than later.
Anyway, I do appreciate your input, how’s 3accounts coming along? I tried setting it up but didn’t get very far. Have you written up any docs for it yet?
I’ve got bogged down earning a crust. I’m looking to try and shake that early next year so I can make some progress. However given your work and that of phreebooks I’ll probably focus on auto-compliance rather than the basic bookkeeping stuff. There’s too much duplication of effort out there as it is.
Phreebooks looks good, and I know absolutely zero about auto-compliance, so I would personally prefer you focus on that rather that the bookkeeping basics. Would auto-compliance differ greatly from the UK to the US and beyond?
I would imagine the financial accounts preparation would be pretty similar given the move towards IFRS, but the tax accounts and general compliance rules would be to completely different rulesets.
I’m going specific UK to start with because that’s what I need, but the key to getting any real leverage is to integrate the system with the bookkeeping. For example auto accrual/prepayments can only happen if you capture a duration for every transaction that relates to a time period (Rent for example).
I’m eager to get recurring payments into Pbooks, thanks for reminding me. I’ll add it to the trac to-do list.