Oliver Elphick schrieb:
I'm not all that keen on web interfaces; as far as I can see, from my limited and reluctant experience of writing them, the programminglanguages are poor and debugging is a nightmare.
That's true. But a web interface has the advantage, that the ledger can be used from anywhere. Even restricted user accounts can be given to business partners. So they can see their own account. For a small association, where I am the financial administrator, our bookkeeper wrote such an small ledger in Apache+PHP+Postgres. Each member can look into his own account and into the consolidated profit+loss, even can change some of the own data like address, email etc. And he can see the original document/check of his payment - just one click away. It's paperless.
The disadvantage is, that strokes from the keyboard cannot be supported easily by an web interface. The same is true for some context dependent logic and data.
You need both: a webinterface and a GUI-client with local logic.
I was thinking on the lines of glade + Python or Eiffel. However the underlying database structure should be the same, and I would insist on putting all the consistency rules into the database (triggers, foreign keys, etc.) so you could possibly have two different interfaces to the same database.
Interface layers?You can see a database as a storage interface. Users like to use their own favorite database system like Postgres, MySQL or Oracle. Exchangebility is a good design principle.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer