Re: New developer

[Derek Neighbors]

> 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