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What is XIWA?

XIWA (zee' wuh) is a web based accounting package built with Perl and postgreSQL. It is released under the GPL. It is free to modify and distribute but you must make your modifications available to others.

The package currently runs out of a Portal environment that provides sessions, users, and other web features. Other apps that will share the same data (such as timekeeping and payroll) will also run out of the portal. The Portal is released under the perl license so as to be widely useful to everyone.

Features

Current Features:

Planned Features:

FeedBack

Please take a few seconds after installing (or attempting to install) to fill out our feedback form so that we can improve the installation process.
Thank you

Platforms

Client side The original target was the Netscape 4.7x web browser, but other browsers work as well. We are working toward fully supporting open standards. This will aid in browser support.

Server side For now the server is limited to *nix environments (which may include using Cygwin on Win32--if someone gets this working on Windows, please let us know). The database is currently tied to PostgreSQL, but we are working on a layer to abstract from the database.

Goals

In writing the package:

Releasing under the GPL:

Strengths

The Reporting engine is very powerful. Reports can be easily customized and new reports can be created with different styles and layouts. Also, new account types can be added easily. For example we will soon add an Administrative Expenses type in addition to the Operating Expenses type. This is as simple as adding the record to the database with a SQL insert and adding the row to the report with a few clicks.

Powerful Investment tracking was a requirement of the project. Most accounting packages avoid investments (we can understand why). The investment section of the project is a huge task that was not easy to work out but gives a very detailed, precise history.

Perl Modules are now being used to access the data and run the display out of a portal environment. When completed this will allow anyone to write other applications to work with the same data through the API.

Weaknesses

Mixed web programming This project is a few years old and has changed its format as the industry and our programming skills have changed. Unfortunately, the older parts of the system run as Perl CGI scripts while the newer portions are Perl modules. Eventually, all the cgi scripts will be rewritten as modules.

Database Independence is not yet achieved. We have started using DBI to connect to the database but the older scripts still access postgreSQL directly. As the old scripts are replaced, other database packages can be ported to.

Download/Install

The easiest method for installing XIWA is to use apt on Redhat 7.2 or 7.3. It might work on 8 or 9 but we haven't tried it. If you don't have apt for Redhat, go to FreshRPMS. Afterwords add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

rpm http://www.pcxperience.org/apt redhat/portal/en/i386 perl5.6.1

Then run apt-get update and apt-get install xiwa. After the install, it will tell you to run the post-install scripts for the Portal and XIWA. There are quite a few so you may want to use a different console session so you can refer back to that screen.

Hopefully, we will make debs available in the future. We have just started working with them.

Manual installation
First, install the Portal. You will need some perl modules to satisfy dependencies. If you want them all quickly go here. (We try to keep a version of each of these packages that works, but you may want to get the latest versions.) You MUST use DBD::Pg for Postgres since XIWA currently only works with PostgreSQL 7.1 or later.

Note: XIWA 1.4.1 currently requires PCX Portal 0.1.07 and will not install into the latest PCX Portal 0.2.00 release. If you do not have PCX Portal 0.1.07 go here to find it.

Recap:
* dependencies in an apt rpm repository. Go here for instructions on using apt with it.
* Portal
* PostgreSQL
* XIWA

Contact

If you need help, check the documentation and mailing lists on the SourceForge Logo project page for XIWA.

If you need more help the package will be commercially supported by Xperience, Inc.

Copyright (c) 2001-2003 Xperience, Inc.

Updated: $Id: index.html,v 1.10 2003/06/10 20:24:37 moreejt Exp $