Happy Birthday, LedgerSMB

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

Today is the first anniversery of LedgerSMB's first public release.

In the past year, we have released three major releases:

1.0.0:  Major security enhancements

1.1.0  Moderate security enhancements, new features

1.2.0  Major security enhancements, new features.

In addition, each of these releases has had several revisions which have corrected various bugs and security issues.  All in all, we have had nearly 25 releases in a year.  We have gone from 300-500 downloads in our first few months to 800-1200 most months currently.  While this is still only half of the downloads SQL-Ledger was seeing before the fork (at least on Sourceforge), it is a noteworthy achievement.  If such a pattern continues, perhaps we can double the downloads again in the next year.

In the next year, I expect that we will release at least two more major releases:  1.3.0 and 1.4.0.  These two releases will be extremely noteworthy.

1.3.0 will include a new MVC-like architecture for new code, and the object model will largely be defined in the database.  All contact management areas of the software will be redesigned and moved to this architecture.  Additionally, we will have voucher processing capabilities, a redesigned payment and reconciliation interface, and many more enhancements.  This will be the last major release which is expected to have structural security enhancements.  It is also expected that there will be a limited RESTful web services interface available.

1.4.0 will re-design all the financial and supply chain management logic and move it to the new framework.  This is likely to be a large job but when we are done, we will be close to 2.0.

2.0 will be a major milestone.  At this point, not only will we be free from the SQL-Ledger code, but we will also have taken the time to review every area of the program.  It will be possible to move away from framesets at this point, and entirely redesign the UI to make the program more usable.  While I do not know for certain that we will reach this point in the next year, current progress suggests we may.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers