VB to Python migration

[Magnus Lycka]

Josh wrote:
> I understand what you are saying, and I'm sure the tasks our program 
> does could be made much cleaner. But, implementing an ERP which is 
> basically what we have, is a large project and the users need (or maybe 
> just want) access to lots of information.

I'm not pretending to know what this system does in detail, but the
fact that you need to access a lot of information doesn't imply that
you need lots of different user interfaces. I think e.g. wordprocessors,
spreadsheet programs and SQL monitors etc are proof of that.

I suppose that you need to present a lot of differnt kinds of data,
and that you need to provide various search parameters etc for
different data sets, but this sounds like something that might be
very few screens that adapt to some kind of meta-data, perhaps XML
descriptions or small "configuration files" containing som simple
Python data structures and possibly input validation routines etc.
Maybe this information should even be in the database?

The problem arises if there is behavior in the application that
varies with data, but with Python, it's certainly possible to handle
that to some extent even if these screens are driven by database
content.

BTW, I guess DABO http://dabodev.com/ is intended just for this kind
of application, but I doubt it was ever used for a project of this
size, it's fairly new... Never used it myself...

Whatever you use for your user interface, I suggest that you use
a multi-tier approach, and a very thin user interface layer. In my
opinion that makes testing much easier. I'd recommend that you use
a proper test tool and employ a test-driven approach.