On Wednesday 06 June 2007 14:41, Josh wrote: > 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.) Quasar (LinuxCanada) is written in C++, is all hand coded. Which means it is not easy to make simple mods. So the work Brad has provided is not easy to extend.
> > 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. > Yes, as a windows developer I was very spoiled with the tools provided by M$. The closes thing I have found for Linux is Netbeans 5.5 (but watch out for 6.0 and QTJambi) and Eclipse with a bunch of plug-ins. But to be honest I found that VS required the same amount of work that I have now with Dabo. Sure you can develop a form quickly but the support of the form required lots of .Net code. With Dabo it is the opposite - less support code but more work with the visual side. Dabo is a general tool to develop real data related apps. > 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. I thought ReKall was more of a toy than devel tool. > 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. I have been creating commerical VFP apps for the last twenty years. All my apps include source code and I believe most VFP programmers do the same. I doubt that source code is an issue. I also doubt it (the fact source is available) would stop an app from being developed in python. > 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? I personally would not want Dabo to provide accounting objects in the core. I wouldn't mind seeing an accounting app built with Dabo available on the Dabo website. In fact Larry Long, and myself are in the process of doing it. We currently have a Customer, Vendor, lookup done. > 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 BTW I wrote a wiki article on how to modify the quasar menu. -- John Fabiani _______________________________________________ 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]
