Announcing the Development of LSMB RDE

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

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