Re: Questions about ERP

[Reinhard Mueller]

Dear Jeff,

Am Samstag, den 26.06.2010, 16:52 -0500 schrieb Jeff Sherk Forerunner
Ministries:
> Is the ERP still in the planning stages only? Is there any code at all
> that has started to be written?

Yes and no. The "official" development of an ERP within GNUe has not
started at all, all we have is some documents.

However, I know that a number of people have deveopled more or less
specialized solutions based on GNUe, mostly for their own use. Those who
have done so, please speak up now ;-)

> Can somebody explain a little more about the developer tools... it
> seems to me that they could be used 'as-is' to establish an ERP (or
> any other type of database driven system) quite easily.

That's the goal of these tools, yes. I'm not sure what explanation
you're exactly after, so I'll try to give a quick overview:

GNUe-Appserver is the business logic server. For a full blown ERP I'd
recommend to use GNUe-Appserver. It allows you to write business logic
rules in Python in a layer which will live above a standard SQL data
storage. Apart from the still missing authentication and access control
support, it's pretty much where we would want it.

GNUe-Forms is the UI component. You write an XML file defining how an
input form should look like, and GNUe-Forms will make that into a real,
interactive application. At runtime, and for several platforms (GNOME,
KDE, Mac OSX, Windows, and Curses), with no change in the XML necessary
when the platform changes. Used in production on several sites.

GNUe-Reports is a 2-step reporting tool. You write an XML file defining
what the report should look like, and step 1 will do the necessary query
on the database and create an XML output with the raw data, while step 2
subsequently formats that data for a number of possible output formats
(like HTML, CSV, PDF...) and devices (printer, fax...). Not uses as much
as GNUe-Forms, and probably much less feature complete, but fairly
usable.

GNUe-Navigator is a menu system, does not much more than display a tree
of menu items which can contain forms and reports.

GNUe-Designer was a tool with which you could graphically design your
form definitions (instead of writing them by hand), but it is currently
unmaintained and not functional.

I hope this helps, I'll happily answer further questions :-)

Thanks,
Reinhard

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