Common features for banking modules

Hi all,

just to introduce myself (just in case there are other people than James 
reading this), my name is Max Maischein, and I'm the author of 
Finance::Bank::Postbank_de, for the German Postbank AG. I'm also in the 
WWW::Mechanize cabal, so you can direct your anger in that regard 
towards me...

What I'd like to see first would be some commonality in the 
results/transactions returned by the several modules - something which 
I've factored out into the submodule 
Finance::Bank::Postbank_de::Transaction, but that submodule is very 
specific to the Postbank.

I think that the setup/connection/passwords are also candidates, but the 
most useful thing would be some kind of common storage to allow various 
backends (graphing programs, analysis programs, Ebay shipping handlers) 
access to the banking data. Maybe we could simply come up with some 
database schema and stuff all transaction rows in there and pull it out 
again with Class::DBI. Maybe some xSV-file is even better as it doesn't 
require much technology to access in case of a dramatic failure, and 
diff and grep work on that too.

One thing I don't like about my module is how I reimplemented some 
subset of SQL - you can query my module about transactions within a 
specific range. This should go out, or I would have to make the module a 
DBD-driver - but before venturing there, I think it's more prudent to 
push it all into a database.

The transaction details are a tricky thing, but possibly, there are some 
"standards", at least for Germany. I'd like a separate set of parsers 
for that, as then the applications could recycle the work done there.

-max

• Common features for banking modules by Max Maischein
• Re: Common features for banking modules by James Mastros