GNUe Traffic #88 For 5�Jul�2003

Editor: Peter Sullivan

By Arturas Kriukovas �and� Peter Sullivan

A quiet day in #gnuenterprise - "/me is reminded of the typical ghost town in westerns - /me notices a ball of dead grass cross the channel"

Table Of Contents

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• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	26�Jun�2003		Fisterra - an alternative free software ERP
  2.	27�Jun�2003		GNUe Small Business and Arias
  3.	30�Jun�2003		Application Server, XML and RPC
  4.	2�Jul�2003		Assemblies for inventory in GNUe SB

Introduction

1. Fisterra - an alternative free software ERP

26�Jun�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 26 Jun 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Financials (Accounting)

People: Andrew Mitchell,�Sacha Schlegel

Sacha Schlegel (Sacha) offered cheking www.fisterra.org for another GPL ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) quoted a bit: ""Current release number is 1.4, this is NOT a general solution for all kind of business. It's a public release of an system used to manage an automotive glass replacement and repair company. If you want to use it to manage your business you should check if the present features fit your requirements."" It was gnome-based, only 2 tier as of time of writing, and "looks like a much less flexible system but has some good stuff in it :)" . Sacha noted that writing business applications "needs lots of thinking. Business logic is difficult, different countries, taxes, systems, different accounting ... a lot is different and we the ideal of having a lot generic makes the task even more difficult." He noted that Fisterra was "from a glass replacement company. They might have a clear requirement. We want point of sale with this, this, this available then you can go off and do it. But without clear requirements and the ideal to have everything generic its much harder."

2. GNUe Small Business and Arias

27�Jun�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Jun 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Small Business, Financials (Accounting)

People: Jason Cater,�Mike Vincent,�Derek Neighbors

Jason Cater (jcater) said some remarks to Derek Neighbors: "1. In .gsd files, why name primary keys? Why not let the schema scripter do it? 2. What on earth are "account"s under contact/schema? Organization/companies? 3. For the contact_<phone|addr|url> tables, are the contact_id + <phone|addr|url>_type_id fields unique? I assume it is unique, but am not 100% sure. (I.e., if you have "Home Phone" as a phone_type, can a contact have multiple "Home Phone" entries, without defining "Home Phone #1", "Home Phone #2", ... phone_types?)" . He didn't like contact management in gnue-sb, but promised to "try my damnest to make it work for me" . Jason was also trying to "decide what to do about a financials package" . He was trying to force himself to use nola/arias/acclite, and had converted their schema to .gsd files. Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) asked whether the arias guys had restructured it as they were going to and Jason had to admit - "it's hosted on SourceForge and they've taken anon cvs down. So I can't work against their tree or see what they've done. Very frustrating."

Jason said he would probably use arias, despite his preference not to "use a web-based accounting package - until gnue-sb is ready" . If this was going to take some time, "I'd rather use SQL-Ledger and write conversion scripts later on" - he also needed payroll functionality as well now - "I may outsource that though" .

3. Application Server, XML and RPC

30�Jun�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 30 Jun 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Application Server

People: Vinay Pawar,�Andrew Mitchell

Vinay Pawar (zoyd) said he had been "toying with the semantic web. it's a concept that suggests the use of standardised markup formats for use in apps. more on the line of web services." "the idea is simply to use RDF/XML, which will help to rope together apps." He thought that GNUe Common, with its XML parser and RPC (remote procedure call) functionality, could be used to help with this. He felt that "if all GNUe Packages could use HTTP(REST'ically) as it's underlying app. protocol, their design could be significantly simplified." Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) did not "see how it would help" . Vinay said that "the current arch. seems to be inclined towards RPC/SOAP" which "SOAP complicates matters w/o any sufficient advantage." Andrew noted that GNUe applications were mainly written in two-tier (Forms/Reports talks to database) rather than three-tier (Forms/Reports talks to App Server talks to database), and he was not aware that even App Server was using SOAP yet. Any references to "GEAS", the predecessor to the current Application Server, were probably out of date.

4. Assemblies for inventory in GNUe SB

2�Jul�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 02 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Small Business

People: Chan Min Wai,�Mike Vincent

Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) had been thinking more about assemblies, where multiple inventory items could be combined to form one saleable product. Chan Min Wai (dcmwai) noted that "assemblies will change with time ... so It is really hard to control them ." Mike noted that he had "started putting up pages describing the expecpected features of gnue-sb" - he had not "had a chance yet to discuss it with anyone so it's nothing official (and not linked from anywhere), incomplete, and likely to change a lot..."

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Sharon And Joy
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