By unanimous dissent, the core team has decided today to develop LedgerSMB,
Reduced Dependency Edition in an effort to make the software more acceptable
to new users. The major effort will be in removing unneeded dependencies,
such as a separate web server. RDE would trade security and efficiency for
ease-of-installation.
The major elements of this plan include the following:
1) Creating a PL/PerlU web server which would run all of the CGI scripts
within the database back-end
2) Extensive use of new and improved XML support inside the database
back-end along with XHTML DTDs
3) Moving of some critical XML processing capabilities to Java in order to
be more buzzword-compliant.
Now,, this approach would allow us to entirely ditch the installation of
Apache and use the PostgreSQL server we are currently installing to take
over that role. It would be ideal for low volume, single-user, environments
such as we see in Windows or Ubuntu. However, it poses a major problem in
that PostgreSQL does not run with permission to listen on port 80. So we
will have to ship a patched version of PostgreSQL which runs as root. Some
may see this as insecure, but then we are talking about Windows users here,
for the most part.
Now, the PL/Perl modules will run inside the database back-end and use DBI
to connect back to the database backend, and after doing some preliminary
XML transformaton, would pass the XML document to the stored procedures
where they would be dissected, processed, and stored or discarded. The new
XML datatypes in 8.3 would be used extensively for this.
Finally in order to achieve better buzzword comliance at the cost of
performance and complexity, much of the XML processing will be handled using
PL/J. Although we all known that Java has some issues processing text
(including XML) this is OK because the average amount of data in a
single-user installation is rediculously small. Exceptions may exist, but
then they can purchase a support account and ever more powerful hardware.
We expect this news to be welcomed warmly by the hardare industry as they
seek to find markets for their ever-faster machines.
On the other hand, Happy April 1, everyone. (For the record none of the
above is true, except the unanymous dissent part.)
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace.
It's the best place to buy or sell services for
just about anything Open Source.
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace
_______________________________________________
Ledger-smb-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
