On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:41 AM, John Locke
<..hidden..> wrote:
Hi, Chris,
Sounds good! Notes/questions below...
On 02/23/2012 12:00 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
> Hi all;
>
> I am finishing up what is probably the last of the major
> backwards-compatibility-breaking features for 1.4, which is the
> rewrite of projects and departments. I expect to have trunk in a
> usable (for testing) state within another week.
>
> After that I expect to be working on payroll framework and refactoring
> the contact management. I hope to have these fully working on 1.4 by
> the end of March. After that point, all manual transaction-entry
> parts of the web application should be ready for testing, and my work
> will shift to reporting and CSV imports.
>
Really looking forward to the payroll framework, that's going to be a
huge win for us.
Is anybody working on the web services infrastructure we discussed a
while back? That's the other big thing we're interested in.
I am thinking about reviving Jason's work on the old code here. I don't know of anyone doing active work on the new code.
> I think we can consider 1.4 to be in early beta, but not
> feature-complete at the time these areas are complete. Reporting and
> import logic can be worked on concurrent to testing of transaction entry.
>
Are you running any of your production customers on trunk/1.4? We're
definitely tracking the 1.3 branch still, but if the core financial
logic should stay sound, and there's work being done on web services and
payroll in 1.4, I'd be willing to switch us over when you hit that early
beta milestone and be an early tester again.
Not yet. My suggestion would be this:
1) Wait about another month for the customer/vendor stuff to get solidified.
2) Run in parallel for a month just to make sure that core things work for you
Also a note on payroll.....
Payroll varies a tremendous amount from state to state and from country to country. What we will have will be a framework for building systems which provide payroll functionality. It isn't clear yet which locations will be supported. Because of the fact that rules tend to change frequently, I think this is likely to be a framework which allows local or regional businesses (working with me or on their own) to create payroll systems.
I would like to make some UI improvements using Dojo Toolkit, but this
will be so much easier to do when there's a web services back end.
Web services are on the road map. I guess my main question to everyone on the list is what I can do to facilitate contributions in this area?
Right now I am thinking of reviving Jason Rodrigues's work on this area.and setting it up so that we can get more involvement in actually hooking it into old or new code.
Ideally web services, like reporting, would happen after the main transactional functionality is stable enough for early beta testing.
> I would like to hit feature freeze around the beginning of June, with
> betas at that point being released every two weeks. I think that if
> things go well, we can shoot for a general release in September.
>
> What do people think?
I think it sounds great! Thanks for all your hard work on this.
Thanks!
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com