Desktop/web integration [was Re: GnuCash page on GO site]

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

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

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