Checklist for 1.3

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

Since the 1.2 development has been frozen for some time and we are
rolling toward release, I figured I would list the checklist of
minimal things we should try to accomplish in 1.3.  Some of these have
already been done.  These include:

1)  Web services interface (Jason has already contributed this)
2)  Redesigned customer, vendor, and contact tracking
3)  Redesigned COA handling.  Legacy chart view may be kept around as
a depricated interface.
4)  Redesigned user management, security, and rights management
5)  New dataset management interface and setup wizard.
6)  Basic MVC structure (no framework used, though-- see below) for
redesigned parts.


Overview of the MVC structure:
We will not be using an MVC framework like Catalyst because after
reviewing them, we have decided that the goals of the project are not
well served by this specific technology.  It is true that the
framework is far more useful than we initially gave it credit for, but
we have chosen to structure the application in different ways in order
to provide some additional benefits including:

1)  Cross-development-environment data model.  The same data model can
be accessed from Java, Groovy, Python, Perl, PHP, VB6, .Net, or
whatever you want to use.  It will be entirely encapsulated in the
database (rather than having the data model encapsulate the database).
We will use some basic glue to re-encapsulate in Perl but this will
be thin.  Other envelopes could be implemented easily without too much
work in other languages.

2)  Full data integrity controls managed by the database.  In short
the ORM works almost in reverse.

Any feedback?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers