Working on an online interface
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On and off I've been trying to locate the perfect website/application to record my financial transactions in, to no avail. My main critera were:
- Modern, user-friendly interface
- Ability to track money owed me
- Robust reporting/charting
- Many import AND export options, with customizability
- Still being developed/improved
- Free
Many came close, but all were lacking in at least one category (virtually all two or more). Buddi came the closest (at least in the more important areas), but still was lacking too much for me to be satisfied. Therefore I resolved to make my own, in the form of a website. Because I also really wanted to start recording my transactions now and not wait until I completed the site, I started entering them into Buddi with the intention of making the first import (and export!) types compatible with Buddi (CSV and, most importantly, the *.buddi XML format).
Thus, hopefully soon you'll be able to transfer your transactions to and from an online website! The site is coming together nicely (already spent a couple full days of work on it), and is looking to enter the alpha testing stage within the next couple weeks. I'm very excited and motivated about it (I'm using some great tools that allow cool AJAX features), and will be trying to devote as much time as possible to it (part-time programming internship and other responsibilities, including starting my last semester of college in a couple weeks, will unfortunately be preventing me from working full-time on it however).
Does this sound useful for people? I'm guessing I have a good audience, but I won't know for sure until I start getting feedback from people. The more people interested, the harder I'll work :).
I know of at least one or two people who are interested in a web application similar to Buddi. I personally dislike web apps for this sort of thing, but you will probably have at least some people interested.
What language are you writing this in? If you are using JSP, you can probably reuse a lot of Buddi code! I have kept a strict separation between the Model code and the View / Controller code; at the very least, you should be able to use the Model code without problems, and you can probably base some of your code on the Controller (although my Controller code is pretty tightly integrated with the View).
A cool (IMHO) implementation would be to allow your Webapp to save the Data.buddi file to a WebDAV directory, which you can then mount and use locally with Buddi 8-) A possible added bonus of this is easy upgrades on your part - if I change the model at all, you can implement the new functions with little or not effort on your part.
Anyways, best of luck with this project! If you need assistance when working with the Buddi data format, feel free to contact me directly or post to this forum. As well, I recently added a link to my EMF tutorial, which explains the software used to create the data model - you can access it from the developers page on the main Buddi site.
Cheers
--Wyatt
Yeah, doing it as a website does have its share of disadvantages (downtime, no multiple versions, security, etc...) but I hope to minimize them as much as possible. For one thing, allowing users to export all their data whenever they want.
I'm using a PHP5 framework that allows object-oriented database access (MySQL), so re-using the code from Buddi isn't necessary (in fact, it's already able to show listings of transactions and some basic stats). Thanks for the suggestion, though :).
WebDAV, that's a good suggestion. In fact my host does support WebDAV, though I'm unsure how well it'd scale for multiple users. I'll definitely give it a look.
The Buddi format looks pretty self-explanatory, I don't see any problems there :). I might even have suggestions to improve it, since the site will probably have some data stores that don't have equivalent mappings to the Buddi format.
If you are not using the same Buddi format, webdav is probably not needed (it would be cool to allow both access methods, but keeping two code bases in sync would be difficult at best).. perhaps a SQL database is a better choice...
Cheers
--Wyatt
Web app is OK depending on your needs but if you wish to run it locally without installing a server I heard of a compiler which compiles server side scripted pages and it is all packed into a single exe file with a built in web server and everything in it as well as the scripting engines like php and asp..but the compiler is commercial
Buddi will be part of my solution to allowing off-line access :)