On Wed, 2011-09-14 at 18:08 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
> On 09/14/11 6:03 PM, Thomas Dukes wrote:
> >> One day, if I have time, I want to programme a complete
> >> > commercial accounts systems using HTML, PHP and MySQL. Its a
> >> > piece of cake to do well (meaning easily) but a little time
> >> > consuming. The only difficulty I can think of is printing
> >> > things locally.
> > I love the challenge. I'm a hacker from way back. While this sort of stuff
> > isn't humorous now days and since I've 'grown up', I understand why. Still,
> > I love it!!
>
> an accounting system thats in plain HTML would be incredibly clunky to
> use. you really want to do this in ajax/jquery or whatever so its more
> interactive
>
> also, I'd suggest using postgresql for better data integrity, and
> anything-but-php (Python?) for better webside security.
----
to each his own...
I put my customer on WebERP (http://www.weberp.com)
He has used in the last 15 years...
Real World Accounting (since bought by Great Plains - bought by MS)
Peachtree Accounting
BusinessWorks
Cougar Mountain
Demand
I handled all of the data import/transitions from one to the next with
the exception of Cougar Mountain => Demand because the woman who sold
him on that was a previous technical support manager for Cougar
Mountain.
Anyway, the one he has liked the most is the one that he didn't pay for
- WebERP
Before anyone gets the idea that this is all wine and roses, there are
some shortcomings with WebERP, largely due to the fact that they seem to
do continual releases and never really have a 'stable' version
(regardless of what they say). That meant to me that I had to fix about
10-15 different things and needless to say I have no intentions of
upgrading at this point (now 2+ years down the road). I have more gripes
about WebERP but they are not entirely significant (with the exception
that to 'extend' the featureset of WebERP, I used Ruby on Rails instead
of PHP because I can do significantly better code in one quarter of the
time).
WebApps are clearly the future - it's hard to justify specialized
server/client applications (installation, limited choice of clients,
maintenance, licensing) and it seems that the future will offer 2
choices... SAAS or run your own.
My own take on it... 'plain html' accounting is just fine. This company
has 4 retail stores, each with a warehouse and relatively low skilled
computer users entering orders. Print jobs are downloaded (or e-mailed
PDF files). This is NOT a POS system (then again, neither is
Quickbooks). To keep the PHP reasonably secure, it requires HTTPS and
access authorization is done by LDAP authz so if you don't have a
username and password on his system, you can't get the login screen. Of
course the server is kept up to date.
Ajax/jquery definitely ups the quality of appearance, sometimes ups the
quality of the UI but definitely slows down the application and is just
another demonstration of all that glitters isn't necessarily gold.
As for Paul's expressed notions... It would take a fairly massive amount
of man hours to produce a fully functional dual entry accounting package
for widespread business use. Before you decide on an environment, you
would probably want to commit to test driven development and MVC which
almost invites the use of a framework (Cake/Django/RoR). Personally I am
biased towards RoR but starting a large scale project in ruby, php or
python without using one of the frameworks at this point would be a
really poor choice. There are a number of PHP based accounting systems
out there which you could probably fork but why? They all missed the
boat somewhere, somehow.
Craig
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
