New developer

[Jason Spence]

Hi -

My name is Jason, I work at OST with David and Rich on Bayonne and
other things.

We're in need of a package to do workflow management and increase our
efficiency with invoice processing.  I initially started looking at
JBoss, Cocoon, OpenOffice forms, etc. when I realized that Bayonne was
a GNUComm project, which was a GNU Enterprise project, and so I should
probably be helping out our parent project instead of re-inventing the
wheel.

I'm working on the Bayonne and a whole slew of VoIP stuff at the
moment in preparation for a customer deadline and the Bayonne 1.0
release on July 8th.  Check out
http://lightconsulting.com/~thalakan/opentelco.php when you get a
chance to get an idea of what's going on in open telephony land.

That means that I don't really have the time to work on GNUe at the
moment, but I do want to start reading the code in my free time in
preparation for the day when I can spend some sponsored time working
towards using GNUe in the OST office for automation.

One idea I did have: I've done some math on how long it takes me to
create HTML forms vs. MS Access vs. {Open,Star}Office forms, and the
graphical form builders are something like 3x faster than creating the
HTML forms in emacs and mozilla.  On a whim, I unzipped the .sxw files
that OpenOffice was creating to store my forms, and I found that it's
just plain old XML.

What I thought would be really nifty would be to write a OpenOffice
forms to GNUe forms translator - as I understand it, both are XML
based.  That would allow people to easily get a chance to migrate to
GNUe if they've already used Star/OpenOffice to create database apps.

Another question - what's the status of the Bayonne Forms client?  I
don't see anything in Bayonne CVS like that.  We'd need something like
for an upcoming project we're doing.

Speaking of Bayonne, some preliminary work has been done to port
Bayonne to Cygwin/win32, which may help adoption some.  However, we
ran into a wall where autoconf/automake refuses to take our m4 because
Cygwin is distributing bleeding-edge versions of autotools or
something like that.  If there are any autotools gurus on the list,
I'd appreciate you checking out Bayonne from CVS and helping us figure
out what's wrong.


-- 
 - Jason

Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics:
        Superiority is recessive.