I've gotta use the inventory from quickbooks in my rails web app...it would be nice if I could get quickbooks to use mysql, as that way I could just use mysql between the app and quickbooks, which would make things easy.
Does anyone know how to get quickbooks to use mysql? Or will I be forced to have my app communicate directly with quickbooks, which I wanna avoid :P
Pretty sure you will have to interface with Quickbooks directly. The other problem is going to be that because Quickbooks is a client-side application you will need to have an app on the client that pushes the data to the server. It's definitely doable.
Alternatively, you could just use the export functions of Quickbooks to periodically export the inventory as CSV.
There are a few ways of integrating with QuickBooks, but if it's a web application, your best bet is to use the QuickBooks Web Connector, or to use a commercial package for SQL access.
The Web Connector is the only Intuit-supported solution to integrating with QuickBooks from a web application. Basically, you build a SOAP server / Web Service which speaks a specific set of methods. The Web Connector then is installed on the machine running QuickBooks, and polls your web service asking "Hey, got anything for me to do?" Your web service can then respond with qbXML requests (examples of qbXML here: QuickBooks qbXML Examples) which tell the Web Connector "Add this customer: ..." or "Send me invoices which match: ..." or etc. etc. etc. The Web Connector then relays those requests to QuickBooks, QuickBooks processes them, and the response is relayed back to your web service. Your web service might then process the response somehow, and then send the next request over to the Web Connector. This can continue in a loop for as long as you like, continuing to send requests to QuickBooks and receiving the responses.
You might also look into AccessBooks and QODBC. Both are commercial wrappers around the QuickBooks qbXML SDK which allow direct SQL access to QuickBooks.
Here is some additional information on my QuickBooks Integration Wiki about how to integrate applications with QuickBooks.
You might also want to search around on Google. I know there were some QuickBooks Rails packages/gems out there somewhere, but last I looked it did not support the QuickBooks Web Connector. Instead, the Rails application had to be installed on the same machine as QuickBooks, and it communicated via COM.
We have been using the Web connector for a while now, and let me tell you its been pretty smooth so far. Though the Intuit Quickbooks SDK doesn't let you do wt exactly QB UI would let you. Problems occur especially when you want to enter group items to QB using the SDK. Use a webservice and let it build requests and process responses and push the required data to your database which can simply be anything from a SQL server to MySql/Oracle etc etc. Using this approach good amount of error handling can also be done.
http://behindlogic.com provides a Rubygem (for sale) that will deal with all of the pains of QBXML for you, and an HTTP Connector for QuickBooks that allows you to send/receive messages with QuickBooks through HTTP, which opens the door for connecting from another computer. The gem has an adapter built to use the Connector as well, so you can very quickly get up and running with QuickBooks on Windows and your Rails app on Linux or on your development Mac.