The short leg

One of the great things about Rolonics is that it makes it obvious when things are out of balance. I feel that AW is "stuck in the middle." With AW you can now weave very complex structures, but the simple accounting application is disfunctional. The problem is that AW has one short leg right now.

Rolonics tells us we need a balance between state, relations, behavior and history. In AgileWiki2, behavior was the short leg, and for all its capabilities it was actually quite limited. The behavioral aspects have been beefed up considerably now. But there is a problem with history.

Norm has always made it quite clear. We need a 2-time system. We need to be able to change the past, and lay out our intentions for the future. And the system JSecs are "in the way." I was too focused on the immediate problems with the implementation. But now I see the source of the problem.

There are two journals, methinks! There is the application journal and the system journal. Lately I've been looking at the system journal and observing that it makes for a very poor application journal. And for an accounting application, you've got to distinguish the effective date of an entry from the date it is entered--and that's the start of 2-time.

Another interesting thing is that the JSecs for a double entry accounting application is really a table, with one row for each account that is updated by that jsec. Hmm. Or perhaps it has a CSec for each updated account? Much food for thought here.

Anyway, it looks like we need a 2-time application journal. Could be interesting.

Bill