Question: tools for business apps development

[Carlos Ribeiro]

Hello all.

I'm in the process of writing a business app in Python. (defining
business app: data entry, validation, interactive reports, etc). For
my purposes, it must be a native app (wxWidgets, GTK or Qt-based). A
web application will not do it (although I would love it).

To make a long history short: I used to develop business apps for a
living for a long time (up to the mid 90s). My last experiences were
with Delphi and VB. I know Python, but all projects I've done were
either scripts for sysadmin work, or were networking related (I did
SNMP, NetFlow, and a few web apps, also). Now, a friend of mine asked
me to write a new app for his company, and a I suggested doing it in
Python. I am limited to free tools only, by definition. So I collected
a few questions that I would like to ask here.

-- Which IDEs are better suited for business apps? I use PythonWin for
most of my scripting work in Windows. On occasion, I edit in PythonWin
or SciTE and run using the command line interpreter. I've downloaded
Boa and PythonCard, and while both work (to a reasonable degree), I
found both lacking for a RAD style development cycle. Are these tools
being used for production code?

-- Which free design tools are being actively used for business app
development? (includes database-design, UML, etc). There are many
tools available around, but most seem to be abandoned, or were used
for some specific task and never touched again. I would like to know
more about what is actually being used in production environments.

Thanks in advance for any answer. Best regards,

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com