Best GUI for small-scale accounting app?

[Ed Leafe]

On Dec 28, 2004, at 9:04 PM, Luke Skywalker wrote:

> Interesting discussion. I haven't looked at Dabo yet, but the issues
> that must be solved before Python is a valid alternative to
> proprietary solutions like Delphi or VB are:
>
> - speed where it matters (ie. no 20s load time)

	Load what? The app, or the data? Users don't care how long the app 
takes to start up, since they usually run it all day long. Data 
response is a whole 'nother matter, and Dabo is extremely fast in that 
regard. After all, a data set is nothing more than lists of lists, and 
Python is wicked fast with list handling.

> - good RAD (IDE and GUI designer, on par with Delphi or VB)

	Still in its infancy in Dabo. Would be nice to have a team working on 
it, cos there's only so much a single developer who also has a life can 
do.

> - high-quality, varied widgets

	One of the main reason we picked wxPython as our initial toolkit. 
Nearly everything we could want is in there, and they look good on all 
platforms.

> - good DB connectors

	That's not something we control. Dabo is designed to use existing 
dbapi-compliant connectors, such as MySQLdb. We currently support 
MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird. If anyone has a need to link to 
another db, the script to do it is pretty well abstracted.

> - reasonable footprint (ie. no 20MB program just for a small
> appplication; have mercy on users stuck with P3 and dial-up)
	
	Don't know where we'll come in in this regard. Most database apps 
require some sort of runtime engine, and we'll be no different.

> - ease of deployment and maintenance (ie. how easy is it for an
> application to launch some updated that will fetch updates from the
> web)

	That seems to me more in the domain of apps created with Dabo, not 
Dabo itself. Python already has everything you need to do this, but you 
need to create the appropriate scripts for your server and your app.

> If Dabo can do all this, it could be a great solution to all those

	Of course, we're still pretty early in development; we have 0.3 
scheduled to be released in the first week of January. But we do have 
our sights set pretty high.

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  Ed Leafe
  http://leafe.com/
  http://dabodev.com/