Is there an obvious way to do this in python?

[H J van Rooyen]

"Nick Vatamaniuc" <vatamane at gmail.com> wrote:


| HJ,
|
| As someone already posted, the backend sounds very much like a
| database, so why not use a database: transactions, specific views for
| different users, limited access and so on = database!
| Give PostgresSQL a try...

*nods* - looks like I am going to have to do this....

| As far as presenting a different GUI to users, you can also do it based
| on the database.  In other words have a common login screen and if the
| usertype from the database is returned as 'restricted' draw one
| interface, if it is returned as 'full' draw the full interface. Even if
| the restricted user will get the full interface up it won' t be
| functional because the database would restrict writes to certain
| tables/columns.

This is the guts of my question - if I dont know all the types now, how do I
make the front end so that I can easily update it as time reveals new
requirements - a la banking style terminals - see my reply to Simon please

| Remote update of code is also possible, but you'll have to implement
| some kind of update server to which you can periodically send Python
| files, those files will be installed on the machine by the update
| server. You can try playing with Twisted to handle the networking. Or
| just write a simple script to send  stuff over scp/ssh -- that's what I
| would do (start the ssh server, install public keys and then just scp
| stuff over to the machines assuming they are online most of the
| time...).

This kind of addresses getting the stuff on to the server on the site for me - I
would like the front end to be more dynamic...

|
| The problem will be if something goes wrong in the updated file or with
| the update server then the whole system will be down (an off-by-one
| error in the GUI db client code and all of the sudden all your users
| will be writing bad data to the database... all at the same time). So
| you will need to do frequent backups of the database, but you probably
| know this already...
|
| Hope this helps,
| Nick Vatamaniuc

*grin* yes and it scares the s**t out of me - this is why I like the "do one
thing at a time to completion " approach - much easier to recover when things go
wrong...

- Hendrik