Howdy All, As someone who's been lurking for a while, I'd like to share some interesting thoughts and questions I have about Dabo. This is more of a philosophical muse than anything, but potentially important nevertheless. I started thinking about this whilst chatting with Brad Pepers at LinuxCanada about their GPL'd accounting application; my thoughts were also seeded by a few recent articles (can't remember url's offhand) about the lack of Linux adoption by SME's due to the lack of vertical market applications. (For example, if you run a veterinary office there are many different windows applications you can choose from; none for Linux. Same for pizza shops, car sales, etc.)
The main reason for the lack of Linux vertical apps is that many developers consider Microsoft's .NET tools to be vastly superior as far as rapid development. They may or may not be right (and honestly, I haven't found RAD tools for Linux that compare to .NET). Aside from Java, there is one environment that I've used: Rekall. Recall is much like MS-Access (but based on Python and Qt) and was sold commercially for a while. The commercial venture faltered, but the GPL version of the tool continues to be available (but not supported for more than a year) at http://www.rekallrevealed.org. It was very mature and worked well (including a GUI designer and report writer), but being based on Qt, you had to pay license fees to deploy your app on Windows. I had toyed with the idea of porting this to wxWidgets, but then I found Dabo. So, I wonder, how much more work is involved in making Dabo up to par with where Rekall was? What about if we add other Python-based components, such as Stani's Python Editor, and one of the visual wxPython-based GUI editors? If we do so, we make a giant leap in the right direction with regards to easy cross-platform RAD. There is one side-note, however. Even if we have the best RAD, developing in Python may be a turn-off for commercial app developers because it's nary impossible to obfuscate Python code. But, it does open the door for open source developers to create cross-platform vertical apps. But there's another twist. Suppose we were to add a pre-defined set of Business Objects to our RAD environment, such as Customers, Vendors, Items, Accounts, Invoices? And, suppose that those business objects just happened to come with a fully-featured accounting application, on-par with QuickBooks Enterprise as far as maturity, support, and featureset are concerned? And suppose it was all free? Imagine this. You're designing a new app for your vet's office. In your GUI editor, you start with the main window of a blank project. To create a "New Customer Entry Wizard", you simply drag a Customer object from the Business Object pallette onto the main window, and you're all set. You press the test button, and you can browse customers that are already in the accounting app's database with your new wizard. I think we can get this functionality, it's just a question of how much work? BTW the accounting app is here: http://www.linuxcanada.com Cheers, -J _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/dabo-users Searchable Archives: http://leafe.com/archives/search/dabo-users This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/dabo-users/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
