My name is Jason, I work at OST with David and Rich on Bayonne and
other things.
You are a brave man to tolerate Rich and David. ;)
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.
That would be great.
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.
We are in process of gutting and cleaning a GPL accounting package
called NOLA and making it usable with the GNUe Framework. I think that
might be a good base for what you are looking at and we can add
invoicing enhancements as we go.
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.
We have a visual form designer that in my opinion is about as easy to
make forms in as open office and easier than MS Access.
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.
You could do this with XSLT, but I would say use our visual designer
instead, it would be easier. If someone already had a bunch of
openoffice forms then it might be worth their time to 'convert' them.
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.
We are waiting for a Bayonne stud to step up and make UIBayonne.py ;)
Seriously I have been longing to install and play with Bayonne at home,
but havent been able to afford the hardware. I think David said soon
there will be a Modem compatiable version.
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.
Jeff Bailey is probably our resident automake stud, but I dont know if
he trolls the list or not.
-Derek
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