Worth - Portable Personal Finance
"Making portability a primary requirement
will lead to wider use."
Worth's Goals
Worth aims to be a uniquely adaptable personal finance manager. Not only will it do the usual things -- balance your checkbook, manage your stock portfolios, track your spending, calculate your net worth -- it hopes to make itself available for your commands, wherever you happen to be, and no matter what appliance or device you're using.

Worth is a Web application, meaning you'll run the Worth server on a central server, most likely the family desktop PC. But the program will be available from any browser anywhere in the world that can connect to the Internet. Worth aims to be OS agnostic. The server will run on any machine that supports a Java Virtual Machine and a Servlet 2.3-compliant servlet container. The project aims to support most ANSI-SQL compliant databases for data storage.

"Making portability a primary requirement will lead to wider use."

Worth also aims to support myriad client devices. It will accomplish this by producing both HTML and XML output supported by XLST stylesheets. The power of XSL transformations will allow Worth to support typical Web browsers, hand-held devices and even voice browsers by transforming its output to VoiceXML or other voice-aware mark-ups.

Imagine the power and convenience. Once you've set up your home for Wi-Fi, you can balance your checkbook from your server, your laptop, or even your Palm. Have a big problem with tiny displays? Then imagine when your cell phone provider implements VoiceXML (Cell infrastructure manufacturer Glenayre is already working on a VoiceXML implementation). When your cell phone has a built-in voice browser, Worth will tell you your checking balance. Ultimately, we should have hooks into most bank bill-pay systems, allowing Worth to pay bills on-line, using your computer, your handheld or your cell phone.

Worth's Current State
Worth is a personal finance manager implemented as a Java Web application. Currently (October 2002) Worth is running on my Linux system using Sun's SDK v1.4, Jakarta-Tomcat v. 3.3.1 and HSQL Database Engine. Until recently, Worth was backed by a MySQL database, and continues to be portable across both HSQL and MySQL.

I've used the program for nearly a year to balance my checkbook; track charges, payments and balances on multiple credit cards; track my two mortgage balances; manage stock portfolios, and calculate my net worth. Worth categorizes every transaction in a user-defined category, making it very easy to discover where your money went. The program also manages individual stock prices in near-real-time by communicating with the Yahoo quote server.

Worth has worked so well for me I've decided to make it public. In the near future I'll be populating CVS with the existing Java, JSP and Javascript code. This code will be Open Source and published under the Gnu General Public License (GPL). In the intermediate future, I hope to have a self-contained package of Worth code, the HSQL jar file and the Jetty HTTP server and servlet container. All you'll need to set up and run Worth will be a JVM.

Monitor this site over the next few weeks. A downloadable and functioning version will appear soon!

"Worth is taking on it's identity."






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