On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, Adam Thompson wrote:
Part 2 is a monetary subsystem for financial applications. This will include currency validation logic, date-based exchange-rate handling, and the like.This is the scary part; as a one-man band, maintaining this part seems like a Sisyphean task. As a community, though, it's feasible, although barely (IMHO).
Agreed, that is worrisome a little.I am having visions of a planet wide list of servers along the lines of the distributed redundancy RBL/Pizor/etc. anti-spam databases, which replicate data for systems with a need to draw upon it. As long as one group somewhere can update those databases regularly, something like that should be doable--either on a per-request basis via an API call, or on a downloadable library basis.
The type of data needed is available for commercial purposes, and is kept constantly updated by the business world in general. I'm not so sure about historical data going back more than 50 years, although I have had the need to do currency conversions over a 120 year span, and have found databases with that information which at least claimed to be accurate.
So no constructive comment here, other than "wow, that's going to be a bugger to maintain, but nice if it can be done."--the constructiveness of which is highly suspect.
Luke