MobileDude Blog: Grism Development Update

Grism Development Update

Nicholas Rahn — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 06:03:00 -0400

Work on the next version of Grism is proceeding nicely. It has been a while since the last version (v0.7.1 came out in May), but I have not been completely dormant during that time. :-)

The bulk of the work on the upcoming version (to be numbered v0.8.0) is being done on the portfolio. I am adding a “cash” line so that you can track not only the stocks you own, but any uninvested portion of your portfolio. You can deposit or withdraw from the cash pool using a new “Cash Management” dialog, accessible from the portfolio’s menu-bar. Additionally, when adding (buying) or removing (selling) a stock, the amount of the transaction (value of the stock and transaction fees) is subtracted or added to the cash pool.

There are a number of other, smaller changes in the upcoming version. Lots of small bugs have been corrected and many interface niceties have been added. Among the most interesting is the selection in the “folders” tree (tree view of watchlists and portfolios on the left-hand side of the interface). Now the selection can not be removed (something must always be selected) and it should behave better when “Watchlists” or “Portfolios” are collapsed.

Finally there have been a large number of changes under the hood. Most notably is that the watchlist and portfolios are now stored in a database rather than in CSV files. When you run Grism for the first time after upgrading, the data in the CSV files will automatically be moved into the database.

The watchlist/portfolio database uses mongoose, a pure-Ruby, file based database management system. It is a bit like SQLite, in that it does not require a daemon process, but it is written in pure Ruby so there are no external libraries to install. The author has also written the KirbyBase pure-Ruby database management system which Grism currently uses to manage a stock’s historical price data (used to draw the price chart). Mongoose is reportedly faster than KirbyBase and has an ActiveRecord like API. It is also now receiving more active development than KirbyBase. For these reasons, we will probably replace KirbyBase with Mongoose during an upcoming (but not v0.8) version of Grism.

Other under-the-hood changes are meant to clarify Grism’s internal design. A significant amount of refactoring on the class hierarchies has been done. In lieu of a design document, this should help anyone who wants to get a grasp on the code.

Future Directions

So where is Grism headed? As I mentioned previously, v0.8 will contain a number of changes to the portfolio. At the moment, I haven’t decided exactly where to stop for this version. There are a number of small things left to do that I’m pretty sure will find their way into v0.8 (remove/sell dialog, short-sell support). Beyond that, however, is the idea of an historical log of all transactions that occurred in the portfolio. Probably, part of this will find its way into v0.8, but it will only be an under-the-hood change and won’t be made visible until the next version.

Looking toward v0.9, I currently see working on the portfolio’s historical log and the move to Mongoose from KirbyBase for the historical price data. For v0.10, I was imagining beefing up the charting capabilities. There are also things such as adding (lots) more user preferences, possibly even having preferences for individual watchlists and portfolios. I’m imagining preferences for things like configurable columns, no-value portfolios (a portfolio where the value amounts were not shown, only percentages were), chart colors, etc.

But anything beyond v0.8 is really up in the air yet. If any of the faithful Grism users have any preference or ideas, don’t hesitate to speak up!

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