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 * Standard Format * Text Format * 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 This covers the three main mailing lists for the GNU Enterprise (http:// www.gnuenterprise.org) project, plus the #gnuenterprise IRC channel. 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 (http:// 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_ tables, are the contact_id + _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 (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue-sb/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..." Sharon And Joy Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.