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This document outlines the "system requirements" for running my asset allocation report software ("ASAL", for short), that is, this document will tell you what other software you will need in order to run it. To a first approximation, the answer to that is fairly simple: you need to have, and use, one of the two supported PFPs (personal finance programs), which are jGnash and Moneydance.
It remains only to fill in a detail: what are the supported versions of each of these programs?
The supported version of jGnash is 1.13.0, which was released on January 17, 2011. It is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/files/Stable%201.x/; look under "Release 1.13.0".
Note that there is also a 2.x series of releases: jGnash 2.5.0 has recently been released. The 2.x releases are more feature-rich, in general, than the the 1.x releases. However, my Asset Allocation Report software does not work with any of the 2.x releases (at least, not yet).
If you are wondering why I coded ASAL to work with a generally less capable version of jGnash, and not with the latest and greatest, see the "Footnote" section below.
As for Moneydance, I have the 2007 release (build 579), and so this is the version with which the Asset Allocation Report has been developed and tested. I am unable to say, right now, whether it would work with Moneydance 2010, though I don't know of any particular reason why it shouldn't.
If you want more information on my relationship with the two PFPs, jGnash and Moneydance, see my general Software Projects page.
Why does ASAL work with jGnash 1.13.0, and not with any of the 2.x releases of jGnash? There are two answers to this.
The first answer is that my primary computer, the one on which I developed and tested ASAL, is an old Macintosh with a PowerPC chip. It can't run jGnash 2.x releases, because of a system requirement that they have in turn: they require Java 6. And Apple has not made Java 6 available for old Macintosh computers such as mine.
And the second answer is something that resulted from the first. In addition to writing this Asset Allocation Report software, I have done some "maintenance" programming on jGnash itself. More specifically, I have been the "maintainer" of the jGnash 1.x series of releases, ever since the first in the 2.x series was released.
As the word "maintenance" usually implies in the world of software, the changes I have made to jGnash 1.x are mostly bug fixes. But I took advantage of my dual role to put a small enhancement into jGnash 1.13.0 that would make the Asset Allocation Report software easier to write. Naturally, this went into 1.13.0, and not into a 2.x release, because I am more familiar with the 1.x code base ... not to mention the fact that my own computer [still] can't even run jGnash 2.x.
This page created: 2010-11-02
This page last modified: 2011-01-31
© Copyright 2011 by Tom Edelson.