Announce:
Version 1.1.20 of gnucash is out. This rolls in miscellaneous bug fixes,
and provides the very first skeleton of a report generator. Although
it ships with XmHTML-1.1.0, it really requires you to install XmHTML-1.1.5
to work properly. Re-run the configure scripts after installing
XmHTML-1.1.5.
I envision creating the reports as html, and using the XmHTML widget to
display them. In fact, I am very excited contemplating this technology.
By using the HTML widget as the main display canvas, I have an easy-to-use
but quite powerful layout engine that I could not match if I used, say,
XmDrawingArea or gtk_canvas(?). It allows for nice colors, easy-to change
fonts, a "frames" sidebar with a report menu in it, embedded graphics,
etc.etc. Writing the code to emit the appropriate tables & etc. needed
is a bit harder. In order to make a clean distinction between the code
that creates the reports and the html that displays them, I'm thinking of
butchering a copy of PHP-3 and using that to render the pages. This is a
rather wild thought, as PHP-3 is normally used to crete server cgi-bins,
not client-side display canvases. And that is, of course, why I'm excited
by this idea.
GUI programing has long been a tedious, time-consuming process, and people
have been scheming around it for a decade, with everything from NeXT's very
first GUI builder to ActveX and whatnot. I really like the idea of
combining a simple markup language like HTML that non-programmers can
master, with an engine that doesn't need to know about GUI's, to create a
whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
--linas
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