Re: future of LedgerSMB

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Just a few thoughts regarding the possibility of add-ons.  THese are
just my opinions and no guarantee that we will go this way, and I
reserve the right to change my mind after discussions wiht the
community and other core members....

I would really like to see four stable areas for integration:

1) Physical structure (needed for database integration via triggers).
Having this stable is a *long* way off.

2)  Data Logic API (stored procedures)

3)  Document-level API (XML)

4)  UI-level API (XML/XSLT, accessible via AJAX)

Obviously the entire app will probably never be accessible via all
areas of this API as experimental features may lack some aspects
allowing us to modify before we solidify.  And the core areas of the
app will probably not all be available in this structure before 2.0
(in fact, I would suggest that that is the definition of 2.0).
However, this does not mean that add-ons cannot be developed before
then.  Depending on the functionality the add-on requires, it may be
able to build on using the general framework provided by some areas.

As for MVC, I would argue (as I think Josh has) that our design is
likely to be a light-weight MVC type structure but without a toolkit.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers