Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

If you started with a "Single User" system, then all operations can take 
place in RAM - of whatever sort. This would be no different than editing 
a document with a word processor that is not journaling. If you take a 
power hit, you lose your work to that point in time. You get done 
posting transactions or generating reports - you "Exit - Save" and your 
work is written to a database. (The simplest form would be a stream file 
  where you do a 'Write for your data structure.)

 From there, you can consider if you want to make this a multi-user 
system. An upgrade would be to write a wrapper around the core 
accounting object that acts as a "Server". Multiple clients connect, 
post transactions, disconnect, etc. The server is enforcing a kind of 
transactional integrity and it naturally lends itself to a network. 
(You're still stuck with a potential power-outage problem, but that 
isn't insurmountable. Worst case, you force writes to the database every 
few minutes.)

There would be a couple of advantages to this approach - one technical 
and one financial. Starting with a simple single-user system gives you a 
reasonably simple goal to shoot for and lets you iron out all the bugs 
while building your understanding of what you are doing. The second is 
that you could easily release the single-user version as a freebie that 
would get people using it and then provide the multi-user version as a 
paid-for upgrade.

MDC

Robert I. Eachus wrote:

> contents of the NVRAM get full.  But my preference is to write the 
> entire database out when the session is done, without, of course, 
> overwriting the current version on disk.  With proper design, you can 
> have a complete journalling and audit trail system with little or no 
> user involvement.
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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