Using Python for business app development

[Ben Leslie]

On Sun, 22 Dec 2002, Joe Bolton wrote:

> My Technology company is currently evaluating Python for use as a
> x-platform dev tool for developing business apps (GUI and/or Web based
> accounting type apps). We have developed for years on proprietary type
> systems (mainly IBM AS/400's) & some win apps using MS/VB. We have
> researched python for about 2 months and we are impressed with what we
> have found. There does not to seem to be alot of accounting type
> applications avaliable that were developed with python. Is there a
> reason(?) since it appears to have the capability. We are looking at
> pyQT and/or wxPython for the GUI dev, Zope(& 3rd party tools) for web
> dev, and postgreSQL for relational db. Also looking for some modeling
> tools compatible with python. Any comments or advice from experienced
> developers is appreciated.

Although not an accounting package, I have been developing a large
point of sales / inventory management program using Python and Postgresql.

Python is certainly more than capable of this task. (And so is
postgresql :).

Of course, this has been a totally Linux only development so far, and
attempts to get the client program running on Windows has been problematic
so far, mainly because the database interface I'm using (psycopg), doesn't
seem ported to Windows. (Well there is a port, but it segfaulted when
I connected to a database, so it wasn't much use.) Also I'm using gtk for
the GUI, and had problems running that on Windows.

I guess my main advice would be that if you are looking for x-platform, 
check and test the modules you are looking at using early in the development
cycle.

Cheers,

Benno