Daniel Pocock’s personal blog | Xtuple

Arrival at FSFE Summit and QtCon 2016, Berlin

2016-09-02T10:46:39+02:00

The FSFE Summit and QtCon 2016 are getting under way at bcc, Berlin. The event comprises a range of communities, including KDE and VideoLAN and there are also a wide range of people present who are active in other projects, including Debian, Mozilla, GSoC and many more.

Talks

Today, some time between 17:30 and 18:30 I'll be giving a lightning talk about Postbooks, a Qt and PostgreSQL based free software solution for accounting and ERP. For more details about how free, open source software can make your life easier by helping keep track of your money, see my comparison of free, open source accounting software.

Saturday, at 15:00 I'll give a talk about Free Communications with Free Software. We'll look at some exciting new developments in this area and once again, contemplate the question can we hope to use completely free and private software to communicate with our friends and families this Christmas? (apologies to those who don't celebrate Christmas, the security of your communications is just as important too).

A note about the entrance fee...

There is an entry fee for the QtCon event, however, people attending the FSFE Summit are invited to attend by making a donation. Contact FSFE for more details and consider joining the FSFE Fellowship.

Is WebRTC one of your goals for 2016?

2015-12-09T23:19:52+01:00

WebRTC continues to gather momentum around the world. Over the next week, Paris will host a TADHack event on WebRTC (12-13 December) followed by Europe's most well known meeting of the WebRTC community, the annual WebRTC Conference and Expo, 16-18 December.

2015 has been a busy year for WebRTC developers, in the browser, on the server-side and even in documentation, with the online publication of The RTC Quick Start Guide. These efforts have all come together to create a stable foundation for many implementations in 2016.

Demo

The JSCommunicator demo video shows just how convenient WebRTC can be, looking at the first customer-facing WebRTC deployment on Wall Street, a project I put together back in 2014:

(click here to see it on the JSCommunicator page or here to download it)

This solution was implemented entirely with free, open source software integrated with a traditional corporate PBX. The project involved significant innovation to bring together a new technology like WebRTC with a very established corporate telephony infrastructure. For example, the solution makes use of the reSIProcate Python scripting to add the Avaya UUI headers to the SIP signaling, so it can integrate seamlessly with all existing Avaya customizations and desktop CRM software.

Is this something you can imagine on your organization's web site or as part of your web-based product or service?

DruCall module for Drupal - WebRTC without coding

If you run a Drupal CMS or if you would like to, the DruCall module provides a very quick way to get started with WebRTC.

On a Debian or Ubuntu server, you can automatically deploy the entire Drupal stack, Apache, MySQL and all module dependencies with

$ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports drupal7-mod-drucall

JSCommunicator, the generic SIP phone for web pages

If you don't want to do any JavaScript development, JSCommunicator may be the way to go.

JSCommunicator is a completely generic solution that can be completely re-branded just by tweaking the HTML and CSS. All phone features can be enabled and disabled using the configuration file.

WebRTC plugins for CRM solutions

As part of Google Summer of Code 2014, Juliana Louback created a WebRTC plugin for the xTuple enterprise CRM and ERP suite.

The source code of the DruCall and xTuple plugins provide an excellent point of reference for developing similar plugins for other web applications. Both of them are based on JSCommunicator which is designed to embed easily into any existing HTML page or templating system.

Get involved

To find out more and discuss RTC using free software and open standards, please join us on the Free-RTC mailing list.

Comparison of free, open source accounting software

2015-12-08T22:17:15+01:00

There are a diverse range of free software solutions for accounting.

Personally, I have been tracking my personal and business accounts using a double-entry accounting system since I started doing freelance work about the same time I started university. Once you become familiar with double-entry accounting (which doesn't require much more than basic arithmetic skills and remembering the distinction between a debit and a credit) it is unlikely you would ever want to go back to a spreadsheet.

Accounting software promoted for personal/home users often provides a very basic ledger where you can distinguish how much cash goes to rent, how much to food and how much to the tax man. Software promoted for business goes beyond the core ledger functionality and provides helpful ways to keep track of which bills you already paid, which are due imminently and which customers haven't paid you. Even for a one-man-band, freelancer or contractor, using a solution like this is hugely more productive than trying to track bills in a spreadsheet.

Factors to consider when choosing a solution

Changing accounting software can be a time consuming process and require all the users to learn a lot of new things. Therefore, it is generally recommended to start with something a little more powerful than what you need in the hope that you will be able to stick with it for a long time. With proprietary software this can be difficult because the more advanced solutions cost more money than you might be willing to pay right now. With free software, there is no such limitation and you can start with an enterprise-grade solution from day one and just turn off or ignore the features you don't need yet.

If you are working as an IT consultant or freelancer and advising other businesses then it is also worthwhile to choose a solution for yourself that you can potentially recommend to your clients and customize for them.

The comparison

Here is a quick comparison of some of the free software accounting solutions that are packaged on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora:

Product	Postbooks	Tryton	GnuCash	LedgerSMB	Beancount (see )	Ledger(-cli)	hledger	Firefly III	HomeBank	Skrooge	KMyMoney	BG Financas	Grisbi	Invoice Ninja
GUI	Y	Y	Y	N	?	?	?	?	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
Web UI	Y	Y	N	Y	?	?	Y	Y	N	N	N	N	N	Y
Sandstorm UI	N	N	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	N	N	N	N	N	N
Multi-user	Y	Y	N	Y	?	?	?	?	N	N	N	N	Y	Y
File storage	N	Y	Y	N	?	?	?	?	Y	Y	Y	N	N
SQL storage	Y - PostgreSQL	Y - PostgreSQL	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	N	N	Y	Y	Y	Y - MySQL
Multi-currency	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	N	Y	Y		Y
A/R	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	N	Y	Y		Y	Y
A/P	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	N	Y	Y		Y
VAT/GST	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	N	N	Y		Y
Inventory	Y	Y	N	Y	?	?	?	?	N		N		N
Linux	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	?	?	?	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Windows	Y	Y			?	?	?	?
Mac OS	Y	Y			?	?	?	?
Technology	C++, JavaScript, Node	Python	C	Perl	?	?	?	?	C			Java		PHP, Laravel
License	CPAL	GPL3	GPL2	GPL2	GPL2	BSD	GPL3	GPL3						Attribution Assurance (BSD)

The table doesn't consider Odoo (formerly OpenERP) because the packages were considered buggy and are not maintained any more, it is replaced by Tryton. Compiere and Adempiere are other well known solutions but they haven't been packaged at all.

Features in detail

While the above list gives a basic summary of features, it is necessary to look more closely at how they are implemented.

For example, if you need to report on VAT or GST, there are two methods of reporting: cash or accrual. Some products only support accruals because that is easier to implement. Even in commercial products that support cash-based VAT reporting, the reports are not always accurate (I've seen that problem with the proprietary Quickbooks software) and a tax auditor will be quick to spot such errors.

The only real way to get to know one of these products is to test it for a couple of hours. Postbooks, for example, provides the Demo database so you can test it with dummy data without making any real commitment.

User interface choices

If you need to support users on multiple platforms or remote users such as an accountant or book-keeper, it is tempting to choose a solution with a web interface. The solutions with desktop interfaces can be provisioned to remote users using a terminal-server setup.

The full GUI solutions tend to offer a richer user interface and reporting experience. It can frequently be useful to have multiple windows or reports open at the same time, doing this with browser tabs can be painful.

File or database storage

There are many good reasons to use database storage and my personal preference is for PostgreSQL.

Using a database allows you to run a variety of third-party reporting tools and write your own scripts for data import and migration.

Community and commercial support

When dealing with business software, it is important to look at both the community and the commercial support offerings that are available.

Some communities have events, such as xTupleCon for Postbooks or a presence at other major events like FOSDEM.

Summary

My personal choice at the moment is Postbooks from xTuple. This is because of a range of factors, including the availability of both web and desktop clients, true multi-user support, the multi-currency support and the PostgreSQL back-end.

PostBooks 4.7 packages available, xTupleCon 2014 award

2014-11-21T15:12:43+01:00

I recently updated the PostBooks packages in Debian and Ubuntu to version 4.7. This is the version that was released in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and is part of the upcoming Debian 8 (jessie) release.

Better prospects for Fedora and RHEL/CentOS/EPEL packages

As well as getting the packages ready, I've been in contact with xTuple helping them generalize their build system to make packaging easier. This has eliminated the need to patch the makefiles during the build. As well as making it easier to support the Debian/Ubuntu packages, this should make it far easier for somebody to create a spec file for RPM packaging too.

Debian wins a prize

While visiting xTupleCon 2014 in Norfolk, I was delighted to receive the Community Member of the Year award which I happily accepted not just for my own efforts but for the Debian Project as a whole.

Steve Hackbarth, Director of Product Development at xTuple, myself and the impressive Community Member of the Year trophy

This is a great example of the productive relationships that exist between Debian, upstream developers and the wider free software community and it is great to be part of a team that can synthesize the work from so many other developers into ready-to-run solutions on a 100% free software platform.

Receiving this award really made me think about all the effort that has gone into making it possible to apt-get install postbooks and all the people who have collectively done far more work than myself to make this possible:

The Debian PostgreSQL packaging team making the PostgreSQL server, client libraries and related packages available to install and upgrade easily on Debian and Ubuntu.
The Debian Qt/KDE packaging team providing the Qt libraries.
Andrew Shadura originally started the Postbooks packaging and preparing patches for a clean build on Debian.
Juliana Louback who created the JSCommunicator / WebRTC extension for xTuple's new web interface while working in Google Summer of Code.
xTuple themselves, who have an ongoing and enthusiastic commitment to free software and are actively developing their new web platform on Github.

Here is a screenshot of the xTuple web / JSCommunicator integration, it was one of the highlights of xTupleCon:

and gives a preview of the wide range of commercial opportunities that WebRTC is creating for software vendors to displace traditional telecommunications providers.

xTupleCon also gave me a great opportunity to see new features (like the xTuple / Drupal web shop integration) and hear about the success of consultants and their clients deploying xTuple/PostBooks in various scenarios. The product is extremely strong in meeting the needs of manufacturing and distribution and has gained a lot of traction in these industries in the US. Many of these features are equally applicable in other markets with a strong manufacturing industry such as Germany or the UK. However, it is also flexible enough to simply disable many of the specialized features and use it as a general purpose accounting solution for consulting and services businesses. This makes it a good option for many IT freelancers and support providers looking for a way to keep their business accounts in a genuinely open source solution with a strong SQL backend and a native Linux desktop interface.

Positive results from Outreach Program for Women

2014-10-25T01:53:36+02:00

In 2013, Debian participated in both rounds of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW). The first round was run in conjunction with GSoC and the second round was a standalone program.

The publicity around these programs and the strength of the Google and Debian brands attracted a range of female candidates, many of whom were shortlisted by mentors after passing their coding tests and satisfying us that they had the capability to complete a project successfully. As there are only a limited number of places for GSoC and limited funding for OPW, only a subset of these capable candidates were actually selected. The second round of OPW, for example, was only able to select two women.

Google to the rescue

Many of the women applying for the second round of OPW in 2013 were also students eligible for GSoC 2014. Debian was lucky to have over twenty places funded for GSoC 2014 and those women who had started preparing project plans for OPW and getting to know the Debian community were in a strong position to be considered for GSoC.

Chandrika Parimoo, who applied to Debian for the first round of OPW in 2013, was selected by the Ganglia project for one of five GSoC slots. Chandrika made contributions to PyNag and the ganglia-nagios-bridge.

Juliana Louback, who applied to Debian during the second round of OPW in 2013, was selected for one of Debian's GSoC 2014 slots working on the Debian WebRTC portal. The portal is built using JSCommunicator, a generic HTML5 softphone designed to be integrated in other web sites, portal frameworks and CMS systems.

Juliana has been particularly enthusiastic with her work and after completing the core requirements of her project, I suggested she explore just what is involved in embedding JSCommunicator into another open source application. By co-incidence, the xTuple development team had decided to dedicate the month of August to open source engagement, running a program called haxTuple. Juliana had originally applied to OPW with an interest in financial software and so this appeared to be a great opportunity for her to broaden her experience and engagement with the open source community.

Despite having no prior experience with ERP/CRM software, Juliana set about developing a plugin/extension for the new xTuple web frontend. She has published the extension in Github and written a detailed blog about her experience with the xTuple extension API.

Participation in DebConf14

Juliana attended DebConf14 in Portland and gave a presentation of her work on the Debian RTC portal. Many more people were able to try the portal for the first time thanks to her participation in DebConf. The video of the GSoC students at DebConf14 is available here.

Continuing with open source beyond GSoC

Although GSoC finished in August, xTuple invited Juliana and I to attend their annual xTupleCon in Norfolk, Virginia. Google went the extra mile and helped Juliana to get there and she gave a live demonstration of the xTuple extension she had created. This effort has simultaneously raised the profile of Debian, open source and open standards (SIP and WebRTC) in front of a wider audience of professional developers and business users.

It started with OPW

The key point to emphasize is that Juliana's work in GSoC was actually made possible by Debian's decision to participate in and promote Outreach Program for Women in 2013.

I've previously attended DebConf myself to help more developers become familiar with free and open RTC technology. I wasn't able to get there this year but thanks to the way GSoC and OPW are expanding our community, Juliana was there to help out.

xTupleCon WebRTC talk schedule change, new free event

2014-09-09T20:51:12+02:00

As mentioned in my earlier blog, I'm visiting several events in the US and Canada in October and November. The first of these, the talk about WebRTC in CRM at xTupleCon, has moved from the previously advertised timeslot to Wednesday, 15 October at 14:15.

WebRTC meeting, Norfolk, VA

Later that day, there will be a WebRTC/JavaScript meetup in Norfolk hosted at the offices of xTuple. It is not part of xTupleCon and free to attend. Please register using the Eventbrite page created by xTuple.

This will be a hands on event for developers and other IT professionals, especially those in web development, network administration and IP telephony. Please bring laptops and mobile devices with the latest versions of both Firefox and Chrome to experience WebRTC.

Free software developers at xTupleCon

If you do want to attend xTupleCon itself, please contact xTuple directly through this form for details about the promotional tickets for free software developers.

WebRTC in CRM/ERP solutions at xTupleCon 2014

2014-08-13T20:29:56+02:00

In October this year I'll be visiting the US and Canada for some conferences and a wedding. The first event will be xTupleCon 2014 in Norfolk, Virginia. xTuple make the popular open source accounting and CRM suite PostBooks. The event kicks off with a keynote from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the evening of October 14. On October 16 I'll be making a presentation about how JSCommunicator makes it easy to add click-to-call real-time communications (RTC) to any other web-based product without requiring any browser plugins or third party softphones.

Juliana Louback has been busy extending JSCommunicator as part of her Google Summer of Code project. When finished, we hope to quickly roll out the latest version of JSCommunicator to other sites including rtc.debian.org, the WebRTC portal for the Debian Developer community. Juliana has also started working on wrapping JSCommunicator into a module for the new xTuple / PostBooks web-based CRM. Versatility is one of the main goals of the JSCommunicator project and it will be exciting to demonstrate this in action at xTupleCon.

xTupleCon discounts for developers

xTuple has advised that they will offer a discount to other open source developers and contributers who wish to attend any part of their event. For details, please contact xTuple directly through this form. Please note it is getting close to their deadline for registration and discounted hotel bookings.

Potential WebRTC / JavaScript meet-up in Norfolk area

For those who don't or can't attend xTupleCon there has been some informal discussion about a small WebRTC-hacking event at some time on 15 or 16 October. Please email me privately if you may be interested.

Trialing the xTuple/PostBooks next generation web UI

2014-06-04T22:35:36+02:00

For some time I've been using PostBooks to keep track of finances. The traditional PostBooks system has a powerful Qt GUI.

The xTuple team have been hard at work creating a shiny new web-based user interface.

The traditional UI has no dedicated server - all users communicate directly with the PostgreSQL database where stored procedures and triggers ensure the correct logic is applied.

The new model provides an xTuple application server that can handle requests from web users and potentially other third-party apps too.

Who is it for?

Some people may feel that the web UI is intended to appeal to mobile users. While it is useful for mobile and tablet devices, this is not strictly the aim, John has discussed this in a blog.

One benefit of the web UI is that accountants and book-keepers do not need to have a copy of every exact PostBooks version that every client is using. Given that many people only need their accountant to look at their books for just a few hours at the end of each year, the ease of access with a web UI will make a big difference.

Installing it quickly

The xTuple Git repository provides a script to install the whole server quickly. Initially it just supported a single Ubuntu release, I just contributed some tweaks to generalize it for Debian wheezy and potentially other releases. It doesn't appear too difficult to generalize it further for Fedora or RHEL users.

To get going, I recommend trying it in a fresh virtual machine, either in a server environment or desktop VirtualBox solution. The installation script will install various packages on the machine and mess about with the PostgreSQL setup so you will not want to run the automated setup script on any machine where you have existing databases.

Once the virtual machine is setup, make sure sudo is installed and configured:


# apt-get install sudo
# visudo

and then run the install as your normal user:


git clone --recursive git://github.com/xtuple/xtuple.git
cd xtuple
git remote add XTUPLE git://github.com/xtuple/xtuple.git
git fetch XTUPLE
git checkout `git describe --abbrev=0`
chmod a+x scripts/install_xtuple.sh
scripts/install_xtuple.sh

If all goes well, 5-10 minutes later it is ready to run:


cd node-datasource
node main.js

The port numbers will appear on the screen and you can connect with a web browser.

Trying it out

Despite my comments above to the effect that this is not primarily aimed at mobile, the first and second device I tested with were both mobile devices, Samsung Galaxy S3 and a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. I feel the Note is far better for this type of application, primarily due to screen size and the fact that most of the forms in the application have fields that launch popup menus. It appears to work in both Chrome and Firefox on these devices.

One handy feature is that the mobile device can dial numbers directly from the CRM address book, this is facilitated with the tel URI.

My impression is that this is still a product that is in the final stages of development, although some people will be able to use it almost immediately. One significant thing to note is that the database schema is very stable due to the long history of the traditional xTuple/PostBooks products.

xTuple consults community on best license options

2014-03-20T14:31:12+01:00

xTuple, the makers of PostBooks, the compelling PostgreSQL-based accounting and CRM suite have started a discussion about how to move to a more recognised license.

It is really good to see a company dealing with these issues in an open manner and engaging the community for feedback. For those who are familiar with these issues or have practical experience of how businesses have been successful with GPL and other free licenses, please share your comments on John's blog.

Some of the reasons why companies need to think about licensing issues like this:

They not only want to be open source, they also want to engage the community through Github, hoping to make it easier for developer collaboration. A familiar license makes this easier.
They want to extend the product more rapidly by using other open source libraries and need to maintain compatibility of licenses. Using a less well known license can make this more awkward. In the case of xTuple, they are now using a number of libraries and frameworks to support their powerful new web front end.
Having a recognised and respected license like GPL can also be a factor in other initiatives like crowd funding.

PostBooks packages available

2013-09-23T08:03:41+02:00

A common theme that comes up in free software evangelism is the question of how to tap into the huge expenditure that small to medium-sized businesses make for off-the-shelf licensed software. It is well known that many small companies are paying over the odds compared to the site-license rates given to big business, so why is it that small businesses are not rushing to adopt free and open source solutions?

The answer is not likely to be found by fighting a battle on pricing (even though it is a battle that free software is inherently well prepared for). Rather, the most compelling strategy involves helping businesses find better ways to solve their own problems.

A problem that every business encounters in every industry is the maintenance of proper financial records. Up until now, packaged solutions like GnuCash and HomeBank, available in many Linux distributions, have only catered for the smallest businesses and household accounting. At the other end of the spectrum, solutions like Compiere/Adempiere and OpenERP require a level of effort to install and maintain that makes them unsuitable for small users and businesses that don't need their full range of features. OpenERP briefly appeared as a Debian package but subsequently dropped out due to difficulties supporting the package.

There is another choice, PostBooks. PostBooks has recently been packaged for Debian and this experience leads me to believe it will be supportable in Fedora and other distributions too. PostBooks, which started off as a commercial product, was re-licensed as an open source solution in 2007. In March 2013, PostBooks was project of the month on Sourceforge.

Of particular note,

PostBooks has a Qt-based GUI where users of equivalent commercial solutions are likely to feel comfortable very quickly
PostBooks does not depend on any dedicated server processes other than a PostgreSQL database
Using the quickstart database, it can be set up in less than half a day, making it suitable for many consultants and freelancers who may otherwise use a product having a setup wizard (such as QuickBooks).
However, with features like inventory, invoicing, a sophisticated data import GUI (known as CSVImp), a true SQL backend, multi-currency and multiple concurrent users, it scales beyond the use cases that Quickbooks and Sage Accounting are capable of servicing.
The company behind PostBooks, xTuple, is well established and offers related services such as training and an annual user conference (which takes place in just a few weeks). Many business users are likely to find this style of support very reassuring and familiar, even if they don't plan to immediately take advantage of these things.

Limitations

Two particular limitations caught my attention early when evaluating PostBooks:

There is no out-of-the-box support for Value Added Tax (VAT) which is an essential requirement in Europe, Australia (where it is called GST) and various other countries. Some workarounds have been described in the documentation
There is no integrated support for tracking credit card expenditure, which is another very common requirement for many small businesses and professional/freelance consultants.

The developers have acknowledged these limitations and offered to complete these solutions with a crowd-funding campaign dubbed Feature Mob 2.

While everybody likes a free lunch, I personally feel that developers are perfectly entitled to request payment for their work. Having already taken a great leap of faith in open-sourcing a product that had previously been developed in-house, companies like xTuple need to look at new ways to generate revenue.

Having looked at some of the prices of equivalent solutions, I felt quite comfortable pledging a similar amount based on four things:

it is based on the Kickstarter model, they only keep the money if their funding target is reached and feature implementation goes ahead
they are releasing the work as open source
the desire to have the option of using a highly capable free software solution that will be around well into the future
the probability that this is one piece of software that is likely to create more commercial opportunities for free software developers

Next steps

People trying the packages and people who potentially want to package PostBooks for other distributions are very welcome to come and ask questions in the xTuple Debian maintainers packaging list or using the xTuple web forums. Please also feel free to report bugs through the Debian bug tracker.